Preface

Summary

Since the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, almost everyone agrees that the world has changed and never again will be the same. Definitely, there have been major changes since the attack on New York and Washington, and on the U. S. A. as such, but some things will remain the same. And that is so because the world had already changed before the atrocities of September 11 and the reactions to these events.

The world has already changed in a remarkable way because of ongoing globalization and post-communist transformation. These two all important features of the turn of Twenty First century are discussed in this book, especially from the perspective of the Great Transition Depression, which—fortunately—is already in the past, and the fast long-term growth, which—hopefully—is still in the future.

It is strange, but globalization and transformation are often not considered in the same context, or as two interrelated aspects of one bolder process. Yet they should be, because there is a clear feedback between these two phenomena. Aside from the internal forces and external mechanisms, globalization acts as a galvanizing factor, which pushes forward and accelerates the process of post-communist transformation. On the other hand, globalization would be incomplete if the post-communist economies were not integrated into the global economy. After all, the latter would not even deserve to be called “global” unless it encompassed such a large part of the world as the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. They constitute a large part of the world in terms of population (about one fourth) and land (about one third), but not in terms of contribution to the world economic output.

But—as we know—much has changed and the world, from an economic viewpoint, never will be the same again. The postcommunist economies seem to be coming out from the most difficult period of early stages of transformation and in the long-term future they have an excellent chance to grow fast, much faster than the world economy on average and for certainly faster (perhaps even twice as fast) than the advanced economies of the West.