Industrial policy in Eastern Europe: A three-country comparison

The design and implementation of industrial policy in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s are explored. In Czechoslovakia where management of the economy was more centralized than in Hungary and Poland, a policy of promoting production and export of nuclear equipment was effectively carried out; other product groups were less successful. In Poland, bureaucratic resistance undermined the implementation of industrial policies (which were never unambiguously formulated). The Hungarian policy was chiefly oriented toward import substitution. The statistical evidence gives only weak support for the effective conduct of industrial policies in these countries.