Die Verbrauchsgüterindustrie in der CSSR: Produktion und Außenhandel

Abstract

Prior to the Second World War, a highly foreign-trade oriented consumer-goods industry (textiles, clothing, shoes, leather goods, wood, paper, glass, porcellan, ceramics, graphics, and cultural goods), had been built up in Czechoslovakia. Due to its incompatibility with the new growth concept of the socialist planned economy as instituted in 1948, this industry was neglected in subsequent economic plans. Not until the end of the fifties, during the first economic reform, were the problems of the consumer-goods industry taken up again. In spite intensive efforts - particularly in the years 1966-70 - it has not been possible to make up for the long years of neglect. Past omissions have set narrow limits on the growth of consumer goods production even in the current five-year plan period 1971 -1975: Despite the perceptible tendency toward a more consumption-oriented economic policy, growth in the consumer-goods industry is to be slower than that of overall industrial production. As result of the changes in Czechoslovakia's production structure, the commodity group "industrial consumer goods" - encompassing predominantly products of the consumer-goods industry -, which was the export leader in 1948 with a share of nearly one third, composed only 16.5 per cent of total exports in the year 1970. The share on the import side, at 8.5 per cent (1970), is still quite low in spite of sharp increases in recent years. The importance of consumer goods in exports to western industrialized countries is relatively high (1970: 25 per cent), as Czechoslovakia's otherwise important export goods machinery and equipment - do not sell nearly as well on these markets as in the socialist countries; presumably, there will be little change in this situation in the years through 1975. The still very limited imports of consumer goods from the West will continue to compete with modern capital goods for which Czechoslovakia's demand in the West will remain at its high level. On the other hand, purchases of consumer goods in socialist countries are to be stepped up considerably through 1975, with the result that the hitherto export surplus in this area will be partly erased.