SOAS Research Online

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought forth drastic economic adjustments in some thirty countries (over half of which had not previously been independent). For almost all of these, the adjustments would involve a fundamental change in economic, political and social organization, with a substantial minority combining this with debilitating civil wars, separatist conflicts or armed border disputes. In the short run, the governments faced an immediate balance of payments crisis. With a few exceptions, the trade of these countries had been concentrated within COMECON; in the cases of the former Soviet Republics trade had been largely internal to the USSR. Thus, all but a few of the countries (e.g., China) encountered a common problem, to convert from COMECON trade to trade in ‘hard’ currencies.