Author

Cosku Mihci

Date of Award

Spring 2018

Degree

MS

Advisor

Michalis Nikiforos, PhD

Abstract

Economic problems in COMECON/CMEA member countries started to grow in the second half of the 1970s, which lead to radical economic and political reforms in the second half of the 1980s and resulted in demise of the economic and political system in these countries. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate whether growing economic problems in East European planned economies, or in CMEA member countries, were initially triggered by oil crises, through international trade and level of indebtedness channels, or not. Countries examined in this thesis were the CSSR, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, and the USSR; the time covered in 1960 to 1989. Two time-series econometrics methods used in this thesis to check the causal relationship between imports of CMEA member countries from different country groups, their level of indebtedness, and their national income, which are the Toda-Yamamoto version of the Granger causality tests and the VECM estimations for each country. Econometric results from four out of five countries suggest that economies of CMEA member countries were negatively affected by the oil crises. These results showed that the economies of CMEA member countries were more vulnerable to the effects of external economic fluctuations than conventionally assumed.

Access Control

Open Access

Included in

Economics Commons

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