The Challenge of Simultaneous Economic Relations with East and West - Tapa dura

In 1982 the Economic Information Unit of the Hungaraian Academy of Sciences began to co-ordinate an international research project entitled "The Economic Relations of Austria, Finland, Yugoslavia and Hungary with the Soviet Union - Comparative Analysis". The co-ordinator of the research project was the Economic Information Unit of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Other contributing institutions included the Hungarian Institute of Economic Market Research and Information and the Vienna Institute for Comparative Economic Studies. Individually, Hungarian, Austrian, Finnish and Soviet researchers took part in the writing, revising, and preparation of the research papers. In the course of completing the country studies, it became apparent that a bilateral "small country-Soviet Union" approach to the problems of the above mentioned four courtries was too limiting. Economic relations with the Soviet Union should be analyzed in a broader context, namely together with the problems of the eomonomic relations of the countries concerned with the West and the other East-European countries. This perception gave birth to the idea of organizing the conference "The Challenge of Simultaneous Economic Relations with East and West" that took place in March 1988 at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Conference Center. This volume is a product of that conference, which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Austria, Finland, Hungary and Yugoslavia belong to those European countries that maintain ecomomic relations of vital importance with both the West (OECD countries) and the East (CMEA countries) simultaneously. Due to their different historical, political and social background, the solutions these countries found to problems deriving from their "double attachment" have varied. The objective of the conference was to identify the kinds of institutions, methods of settling payments, and trade patterns that have emerged in these four countries . Moreover, the comparison was to serve as a device to understand whether, why, and how much these four countries benefited from "double attachment". Although the basic idea of the conference was a detailed discussion of the four countries concerned. The organizers intended to place the issues discussed into a broader international context. For this reason, besides scholars from Finland, Austria, Yogoslavia, and Hungary, experts of East-West economic relations were invited from France, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union and the USA to give contributions.