East European Reliance on Technology Imports from the West

This report, an overview of current East European reliance on technology imports from the West, assesses the importance to the East Europeans of these imports. The study develops a measure to provide a relative scale of reliance on Western imports for a sample of high-technology commodities for each of the six East European members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, from 1980-1984. The analysis indicates that (1) there is a great diversity in the degree of reliance on Western imports between countries and across commodities; (2) the measure of Western import reliance generally declined during this period; (3) the countries of Eastern Europe tend to rely on the West more for the less compressible higher-technology goods included in the sample than for general machinery imports, and they rely more on the CMEA than on the Soviet Union; and (4) U.S. ability to unilaterally affect Western technology deliveries to Eastern Europe is limited.