Eastern Europe, China and the Third World

The Eastern European bloc operates in the international financial markets like any other group of predominantly capital importing countries, although these are more advanced economies than those considered later in this chapter. Because Comecon’s trading area is isolated by the non-convertability of its currencies from Western markets there can be no question of the countries’ own currencies being used as a unit of account in international transactions. One problem involved in lending to these countries is that detailed statistics about their economic situation, internal and external, are largely for political reasons not available. Some progress is being made towards improving the flow of information, in that countries experiencing significant difficulties with their debt position are publishing further data as a precondition for additional finance, Poland being a recent example. The economic growth and hard currency balance of payments performance of these countries is shown in Table 12.1.