The lack of nineteenth-century national income figures for the small states of present-day Central and Eastern Europe hampers studies of long-term economic development in the region. This article fills the gap by using a proxy approach to estimate GDP per capita on the territories of the Habsburg successor states for the period 1870 to 1910. The results give added support for more optimistic interpretations of the region's performance under Habsburg rule. More importantly, they can be linked to national income figures for later years and used directly in comparisons of international income levels between 1870 and 1987. r he end of the cold war and the collapse of communism mark a major . discontinuity in the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet the dramatic events in the region have not left a completely blank slate. Perhaps the most obvious legacy is the region's relative economic backwardness compared to Western Europe. Comparisons of international income levels are problematic, especially when they involve countries with different economic systems at different stages of development. Yet even if the available data have a substantial margin of error, they demonstrate the sizable lag of the former East-bloc economies within Europe. To what extent does the current lag of Central and Eastern Europe predate the communist period? Even a rudimentary survey of European economic history shows that the source of economic backwardness in Central and Eastern Europe lies deep in the past, not simply in the post-1945 cold war era.1 For centuries prior to World War I, much of the region fell under Habsburg rule. Straddling east and west, the Habsburg Empire stood somewhere in the midrange of Europe's west to east economic gradient and displayed a similar pattern of regional disparities within its own boundaries.2

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/83C72FBA71548152286B83F36501B2E5/S0022050700015527a.pdf/div-class-title-the-economic-lag-of-central-and-eastern-europe-income-estimates-for-the-habsburg-successor-states-1870-1910-div.pdf

The Economic Lag of Central and Eastern Europe: Income Estimates for the Habsburg Successor States, 1870–1910

The countries of the Western Balkans have all been subsumed under a pre‐accession framework that is comparable to previous enlargement rounds, but with two main differences: the EU has thus far refrained from naming a timetable for eventual membership and supports flexible forms of integration in different policy fields. With only a loose prospect of membership, how strong is the EU’s influence in the Western Balkans? With our empirical examples, drawn from energy policy and Justice and Home Affairs, we argue that the incentive of membership remains powerful in terms of initiating EU rule transfer. The key to successful rule adoption in the Western Balkans is to provide clear and tangible short‐term incentives. Rather than full membership, the result is sectoral integration and a creeping process towards EU membership.

Creeping EU Membership in South‐east Europe: The Dynamics of EU Rule Transfer to the Western Balkans

Jn 1880 the vast majority of the citrus, dried fruits, and nuts entering the markets of Europe and North America originated from southern Europe. Over the next half century, dramatic shifts in the locus of production fundamentally altered the patterns of world trade of a wide variety of Mediterranean crops. By the 1920s a number of new lands had come into production, vastly increasing world supplies and, for many crops, wresting commercial leadership away from the traditional centers of production. In particular, California became a major competitor in most fruits and nuts, Florida specialized in oranges, and South Africa, Australia, and Brazil also emerged as important players in world horticultural markets. The histories of most Mediterranean countries over this period are replete with accounts of agricultural crises, episodes of falling rural incomes, social unrest, and massive migration from the agricultural sector. This economic

"Horn of plenty": the globalization of Mediterranean horticulture and the economic development of southern Europe, 1880-1930.

Losing values: Illiquidity, personhood, and the return of authoritarianism in Skopje, Macedonia

1. A Young State and a Developing Economy 2. The Origins of Yugoslav Market Socialism 3. The Great Leap Forward: Industrialisation and Extensive Development 1953-65 4. Systematic Reform in the 1960s and 1970s: The Sovereignty of Associated Labour 5. Growth, Strategy and Economic Structure: The Balance of Payments and the Failure of Adjustment Policies in the 1970s 6. The Debt-Service Crisis of 1982 7. Adjustment Policies in the 1980s: Plus a Change 8. Yugoslavia and the World - An Awkward Customer? 9. Politics and the Price of Reform.

Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt.

MODERN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT has been associated with profound structural changes. Agriculture became increasingly commercialised and therefore specialised, it increased in productivity and shifted towards livestock raising. It supported a rising standard of food consumption, while permitting an overall shift of resources towards secondary and tertiary activities. Industry expanded as a proportion of total output and, within the industrial sector, there was a shift from low value added processing of primary products and the manufacture of single-use consumer goods towards higher technology sectors, especially in the production of machines and metal manufactures, producer goods and consumer durables. Growth caused a disproportionate rise in productive capital stock, and a corresponding deepening of social infrastructure. Fast growing economies were associated with rising personal and corporate savings, supplemented by the net inflow of capital. Public authorities increased their participation in total output. They devoted a rising proportion of their own activity (excluding transfer payments) to the provision of social services to the population, particularly healthcare and education, while reducing the proportion devoted to internal and external security. Rising healthcare and education provisions were accompanied by improvement in the human capital stock, which in turn facilitated the assimilation and development of new technologies, which sustained economic advance. This general statement of the relationship between economic growth and structure loosely follows the template set up in the 1960s by Simon Kuznets.1 Economic structure in countries experiencing protracted secular decline should therefore undergo changes the reverse of those associated with growing economies, though this has not to my knowledge been tested. We would expect economic decline to be associated with a growing dependence on agriculture, especially for selfconsumption, a deterioration in agricultural practice, and a diminution in the physical capital stock in productive industry and in infrastructure. Industrial structure would shift away from metal goods and producers goods, and the quality of the industrial technology applied would deteriorate. Decline would also be associated with negative saving and net capital export. Within the sector of state provision, spending on state security would rise relatively, resulting in a sharp run-down of healthcare and education. This would threaten the quality of the human capital stock. Between 1978 and the fall of the Milosevic regime in 2000 Serbia-Montenegro (from 1992 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) experienced protracted secular

The Economic Consequences of Slobodan Milo w evi

RAMIZ SADIKU IS A MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE in Kosovo, Yugoslavia's Albanian populated province. It was established at Pec in the 1960s to supply automotive components for the Zavodi Crvena Zastava at Kragujevac in Serbia, of which it is a subsidiary. Zastava is Yugoslavia's dominant automotive manufacturer. It started assembling motor vehicles in 1954, but its development ever since has been plagued by supply-side failures and line stoppages. Only once in its history has the volume of cars produced been curtailed by demand deficiency, and then only briefly in 1974. At all other times total output has been constrained solely by its own effective capacity or that of its domestic suppliers. Ramiz Sadiku is one of those suppliers, and a particularly unsatisfactory one, whose unreliability and low-grade output have contributed to Zastava's own underperformance. Kosovo is Yugoslavia's poorest province, in a country with acute regional problems. Since 1957, resources have been poured into the province, to try to industrialise it and close the development gap. Despite this effort, the development gap has widened seriously. Ramiz Sadiku was put into Kosovo as an express act of development policy. This case study1 examines the background to the development and expansion of Zastava's troublesome subsidiary, the causes of its dysfunctionality, and of Zastava's inability to put Ramiz Sadiku in good order (or failing that, to find a less unsatisfactory supplier). The broader intention is to throw new light on the failure of Yugoslavia's economic policies in Kosovo. The information on Ramiz Sadiku on which this study is based is necessarily fragmentary. The most useful source was Zastava's internal newspaper, Crvena Zastava. To some extent, this reports the Kragujevac view of Ramiz Sadiku as a problem supplier, which could impart an outsider bias to the information. But Crvena Zastava is also the newspaper of the entire Zastava group, which includes Ramiz Sadiku. So reports concerning Ramiz Sadiku, like those from any other division of the Zastava enterprise, were supplied from the subsidiary itself. Much of the evidence of its shortcomings emanated from these reports, in which the

Ramiz Sadiku: A case study in the industrialisation of Kosovo

IN THE 1970S A NEW INTEGRATED flat-product iron and steel enterprise, Metallurgical Kombinat Smederevo (MKS), began to take shape on the flat-lands south-east of the town of Smederevo in Serbia. Conceived on an ambitious scale, the new steelworks, together with older facilities in the town, grew to employ (at its 1987 peak) 11 153 workers. However, it ran huge financial deficits as soon as it started producing, its productivity was abysmal, and its expansion plans saddled the Republic of Serbia (as guarantor) with unmanageable foreign debts. This study enquires why MKS, 'the sick man of the Danube', under-performed. It also explains why, despite its inefficiency, MKS became a leading export enterprise in the 1980s, and examines the implications of this. How did Yugoslavia, and in particular Serbia, bear so great a burden, and why was MKS ring-fenced from painful rationalisation? Some causes of its difficulties lay outside the control of the enterprise, and led to deep irrationality in resource allocation, but others could ultimately be traced to deep-rooted mismanagement within it. In taking this single enterprise for study I aimed to explore the sources of decay which slowly undermined the economic system of socialist Yugoslavia. My research on Yugoslav enterprise history convinced me that macroeconomic performance was fundamentally conditioned by enterprise difficulties and strategies, and that only by studying how enterprises worked in practice (rather than in theory) can we make sense of what happened to the economy as a whole. The experience of MKS parallels that of Yugoslavia's industrial economy: it started small and inefficient, but it expanded rapidly and productivity gradually improved. From the later 1960s plans became ever more ambitious, but the price paid for

Michael Palairet

Papers

The Economic Consequences of Slobodan Milo w evi

Ramiz Sadiku: A case study in the industrialisation of Kosovo

Metallurgical Kombinat Smederevo 1960–1990: A case study in the economic decline of Yugoslavia

Mismanaging innovation: the Yugo car enterprise (1962–1992)

Merchant Enterprise and the Development of the Plum‐Based Trades in Serbia, 1847‐1911