The Changing Business Scheme in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This chapter begins with an almost impossible — certainly challenging — task to attempt to explain what is happening in Eastern Europe. When we talk about globalization in the world economy, in many ways from the perspective of Eastern Europe and also from the perspective of each individual country, our primary responsibility is the struggle to survive and to attempt to keep pace with the rest of the world. Emphasis needs to be made that the intention is not to discuss Central and Eastern Europe as a kind of ‘Eastern Bloc’, because the differences between the individual countries are tremendous. For example, Hungary and the Czech Republic are faced with problems of a quite different nature than, say, Albania, Romania or Russia. What they all have in common, though, is the fact that they are engaged in two different processes, one is macro-economic stabilization, the second is restructuring in a broader context — what has been referred to as transformation.