The analysis in the study indicates that it would be too optimistic to expect the Eastern European countries to pursue in the 1990s an outward-oriented development strategy based on export promotion and industrial base that is competitive by world market standards. It is rather that strategy the successful implementation of which seems to be the only way to improve permanently their convertible-currency external debt position in the future. Although Eastern Europe as a region has regained control over their external balances in the late 1980s a deficit balance of the Eastern European nations will remain a phenomenon of the East-West economic relations.

The economic reforms in most of the CMEA countries are radical in the sense that they attempt not only changing priorities and policies, but changing the economic system. But there are many uncertainties in the successful implementation of the reforms. The economic and political reforms still do not have a blue-print of the system to be achieved in the end, associated with a long-term plan for economic policy. Further more, the economic and political reforms are still not based on a fundamental political liberalisation in the Eastern European political structure (except in Poland and Hungary). Neither scholars and policy makers in Eastern Europe, nor Western scholars and politicians, have offered well demonstrated and irrefutable theorems for changing the nature of the CMEA socialist systems. As the prominent Hungarian economist J. Kornai pointed out, the study of socialist economies is not yet a mature discipline. ‘Most of us, dealing with the subject, have only conjectures and hypotheses. All that indicates that the outcomes of the reforms will not be seen soon.