COMECON—The prospects to 1975

Abstract

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance countries (the U.S.S.R., Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia) now form the world's largest industrial complex, the capacity of which largely exceeds the aggregate industrial potential of the Common Market countries. The Comecon countries, whose population is only 10 per cent of the world's inhabitants, today produce more than 33 per cent of the world's industrial output, and their share in the world's national income has reached 27 per cent. This group of countries accounted for nearly 34 per cent of the growth in the world's national income during 1966–1970. In recent years labour productivity in the Comecon countries has increased at a higher rate and the structure of the national economies has been considerably improved. The aggregate share of the power engineering, machine-building and chemical industries in the gross industrial production of the Comecon countries has reached two-fifths, which approximately conforms to the level of the most developed capitalist states. In this article, Professor Dudinsky analyses the prospects for 1971–1975.