The economies of central and eastern Europe are being rocked by the crisis of world capitalism, compounded by the corrupt and pro-big business policies of their local elites.
Defying many economists and commentators, who had forecast that the region would be well placed to deal with the credit crisis due to the lower relative weight of finance capital within their national economies, much of Eastern Europe stands on the verge of insolvency and deep and protracted recession.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist states, central and eastern Europe provided global capitalism with vast new sources of cheap labour and raw materials. In the early 1990s the recession affecting the Western economies, accelerated the flow of capital into the former-Soviet countries, with transnational corporations seeking to cut costs by outsourcing to this newly opened-up low tax, cheap labour areas.
