Rumania's Foreign Trade in the Postwar Period

Abstract

In 1960, for the first time in the postwar period, the Central Statistical Office of the Rumanian People's Republic released data on the country's foreign trade in its official statistical yearbook.The coverage of the statistics given out at this time was highly selective. It comprised only the total value of imports and exports in "foreign-currency lei" in 1958, index numbers linking these data to 1950 and 1955, a geographical breakdown of trade by countries for 1958, and the volume of imports and exports of the "principal commodities" traded in that year. From 1959 to 1963 these figures were each year brought up to date, but no additional information was given out. In the 1964 yearbook there appeared a breakdown of imports and exports by commodity groups (nine in all) covering the years 1950, 1955, and 1959 to 1963. While these published statistics were extremely valuable in themselves, they did not supply an adequate basis for an understanding of the most important trends in postwar trade, including the trade expansion associated with the first period of intensive industrialization from 1949 to 1953, the stagnation period that followed the introduction of the New Course in mid-1953, and the major restructuring after 1958 of Rumania's trade relations with its Comecon partners and with Western markets, which is only imperfectly reflected in the geographical distribution of imports and exports in recent years.