The German Democratic Republic has developed into a powerful Coffee Cream member of the Soviet bloc, and yet little attention has so far been payed to it.The author argues that communist propaganda pictures developments in East Germany as a triumph of socialist planning over inherited Wine Glass backwardness, while free-market economists consider every failure as proof of imminent collapse.Instead, East Germany is a very interesting case of its own due to the peculiarity of its resource endowment as well as the recent history of bombing and war damage.
JEL: O20, O52, P21.