Economy of communist Czechoslovakia

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In the mid-1980s, Communist Czechoslovakia was prosperous by the standards of the Eastern Bloc, and did well in comparison to many richer western countries. Consumption of some goods like meat, eggs and bread products was even higher than the average countries in Western Europe, and the population enjoyed high macroeconomic stability and low social friction.^[1] Inhabitants of Czechoslovakia enjoyed a standard of living generally higher than that found in most other East European countries. Heavily dependent on foreign trade, the country nevertheless had one of the Eastern Bloc's smallest international debts to non-socialist countries.

The command economy of Czechoslovakia possessed serious structural problems. Like the rest of the Eastern Bloc economies, producer goods were favored over consumer goods, causing consumer goods to be lacking in quantity and quality in the shortage economy that resulted. Economic growth rates lagged well behind Czechoslovakia's western European counterparts. Investments made in industry did not yield the results expected. Consumption of energy and raw materials was excessive. Czechoslovak leaders themselves decried the economy's failure to modernize with sufficient speed.

The differing statistical concepts and procedures used by socialist and non-socialist economists make an assessment of the status of the Czechoslovak economy complicated. Foreign trade statistics are particularly difficult to assess because a variety of currency conversion methods were employed to calculate trade turnover value. Data calculated on the basis of non-socialist concepts will be identified here by the use of such Western terms as gross national product; Czechoslovak statistics will be called official data or identified by such terms as net material product or national income.