East Europe’s Debt Situation in Global Perspective: Utopian Versus Realistic Solutions

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to place East Europe’s debt problems, and the solutions being advocated by experts and policy-makers in those countries and in the West, into an international perspective. After all, scores of debtor-countries throughout the world are in difficult situations that appear to have many similarities to those faced by the countries in Eastern Europe. This chapter attempts to identify the common and the distinctive causes of East Europe’s debt problem as well as the possible solutions. East Europe is defined as the USSR, the six traditional and modified centrally planned economy (CPE) members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or CMEA (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, and Poland), and the worker-managed economy of Yugoslavia.