Economic integration in eastern Europe : a handbook /

Van Brabant (Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, UN) is the author of several books, the latest being Adjustment, Structural Change, and Economic Efficiency: Aspects of Monetary Cooperation in Eastern Europe (CH, Sep'88). While this is an in-depth study, the subject is by now of only historical value since coverage ends with 1987. The book's four parts cover the birth and the evolution of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), its institutions; the goals and the instruments of socialist economic integration; and the achievements of and the economic restructuring under socialist economic integration. The detailed coverage is daunting--including subjects like monetary and financial mechanisms and policies of economic coordination (not really valid for CMEA until 1990), and the relation between the socialist theory of value and international prices, a subject that is at best obtuse. Van Brabant takes a safe, official, and noncontroversial approach, exluding authors like M. Kostecki or T. Alton, recognizing Z. Brzezinski for only one publication, not using the excellent source data from Radio Free Europe, and not mentioning the implications of Solidarity (1980-81). The uncommon transliteration may leave the reader confused, and the topic could have been compressed to one half of this book's length. The multilingual bibliography is good. Recommended to historians of the communist economic systems. Graduate collections. -B. Mieczkowski, Ithaca College