This is the first of a five-volume series offering a definitive analysis of the economic development of eastern Europe from the dismemberment of the great nineteenth-century empires in 1919 to the 1975 Act of Helsinki which confirmed the boundaries of the east-west division.

Volume I provides a general survey of the demographic and social structure of eight communist countries - Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia - as well as a description of their economic structure. There are chapters on agriculture, raw materials and energy, industry, infrastructure, foreign trade, and national income and product.