The promise of former eastern-bloc economies is mostly unfulfilled

WHETHER OR NOT Vladimir Putin sends Russian troops into Ukraine, increasingly icy relations between East and West may signal a coda to the era of increasing global economic integration which began with the collapse of communism. In the mid-1980s scarcely a quarter of the world’s population lived in economies which could be considered open to foreign trade and capital flows, according to an estimate published in 1995 by Jeffrey Sachs, Andrew Warner, Anders Aslund and Stanley Fischer. Less than a decade later, the figure had jumped above 50%, and a three-decade burst of rapid globalisation was under way.The era of openness has been good for much of the world. Yet the performance of the countries of the former eastern bloc has been decidedly mixed. While some, like Poland and Latvia, grew faster than the emerging world as a whole between 1992 and 2019, Russia did little better than the far richer American economy, and Ukraine did worse. Thirty years on, the question of why some succeeded while others failed remains difficult to answer.