The 2008–09 Economic Crisis: Consequences in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

In 2008, less than 20 years since most former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) embarked on a major process of political transformation and economic restructuring, Europe was hit by the global economic crisis. The post-communist countries were not spared by the economic turmoil. On the contrary, some of them paid a high price for their close integration into the global economy (thus ‘importing’ a similar disease as the developed ‘others’); some paid for their own policy mistakes, which exacerbated the depth of the problem and in many cases these processes were combined. It was the second recession of the post-Soviet period, with the first, between 1989 and 1994, a massive transformational recession caused by radical changes in the entire economic system, from planned to market economies; the second recession, in 2008–09, had different roots, and thus the policy reaction to it was also different.¹

*This chapter represents an updated version of a chapter published previously as: Piotr Dutkiewicz and Grzegorz Gorzelak, ‘Central and Eastern Europe: Shapes of Transformation, Crisis, and Possible Futures’, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian (eds), Aftermath: A new Global Economic Order (New York, London: New York University Press, 2011), 181–207.