Serious analytical work on the economic history of the Habsburg Monarchy is still in its early stages. Up to this decade historians writing about the dual monarchy relied upon Oscar Jaászi's description of “centripetal and centrifugal” economic forces. The economic aspects of Jaászi's study, which was first published in 1929, were in turn largely based upon the writings of Friedrich Hertz in the last decade of the existence of the monarchy. And even with the upsurge in interest in economic development since the 1950s, economists and economic historians have generally ignored Austria-Hungary. There are doubtless a number of reasons for this, the most important of which is probably the fact that writers have been preoccupied with the “rapid industrializes” and the monarchy is usually thought of as an area which simply did not develop. The common view, in fact, is that in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in a period when Britain still commanded a large share of world trade, when such nations as Germany, Japan and the United States were developing at unprecedented rates, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was left far behind.

For many years, too, the literature contained many contradictory opinions, not only as to the degree of economic development, but also even as to the direction in which the economy was moving. There were several reasons for this. First, descriptions of the economy were often entwined in polemics as to whether the monarchy was disintegrating, and, even more, whether it should have disintegrated. Second, this uncertainty was maintained because of the paucity of research concerned with the process of industrialization in the monarchy.