Introduction

Even now, the foreign economic relations and foreign trade of the East Central European countries have not been sufficiently researched. The literature review for my doctoral thesis on the Polish, Czechoslovakian and East German economies revealed a tendency to neglect foreign trade. This is especially true for foreign trade between East and West, as the contemporary view ‘for both sides’ in the Cold War was that this was a delicate subject, for political reasons. In particular, quantitative data on this sector are seldom to be found. It was only towards the end of the 1980s that foreign trade and economic relations between the socialist and the capitalist economic blocs slowly gained interest for researchers. Even today, only very few research centres deal intensively with this subject. In most cases the results of this research have not yet been published. This stems from four reasons:

1. Previous literature, particularly Western, assumed that, as a result of Poland and Czechoslovakia's rejection of the Marshall Plan in July 1947, the economic embargo by the West from March 1948, and the beginning of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, the value of trade and the intensity of economic contacts between the East Central European countries and the countries the other side of the Iron Curtain was negligible compared with similar relationships with other parts of the world.

2. To date there have been only very few research results pertaining to the question of the foreign economies of the socialist countries in general.