European Summer School 2016 Best Paper Prize Winner. Circle of debt: how the crisis of the Global South in the 1980s affected the socialist East

Abstract

The side effects of the Global South’s 1980s debt crisis on the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) member countries have received scant scholarly attention, even though the members were important trading partners for many developing countries. This paper focuses on the reaction of the East by looking at internal documents from CMEA meetings. It is argued that the crisis of the South aggravated the already pending crisis of the Eastern economies. The CMEA countries reacted by taking on more risks in doing business with the South and trying to secure the debt repayments by adopting Western financial practices.

Biographical Note

Max Trecker (SFB 1199, GWZO Leipzig, Germany)

Max Trecker studied from 2008 until 2013 economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and at the Central European University, Budapest. Since 2020 he is an scientific employee at the Leibniz-Insititute for History and Culture for eastern Europe in the subproject “Socialist Development Models for the ‘Third World'” of the SFB 1199.