Date: 2008
Type: Working Paper
COMECON Integration and the Automobile Industry: the Czechoslovak Case
Working Paper, EUI MWP, 2008/18
FAVA, Valentina, COMECON Integration and the Automobile Industry: the Czechoslovak Case, EUI MWP, 2008/18 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/8710
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
This paper examines the effects of the actions of the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (COMECON) negotiation on the development of automobile production in
Czechoslovakia between 1949 and 1965. It investigates the reasons that led to the
failure of a closer integration of automobile production in the COMECON bloc; it
explores which and whose needs oriented the decision-making process and considers
which consequences the failure of a more integrative policy had on the Czechoslovak
enterprise Skoda. The paper sheds light on a specific project, elaborated in 1949 by
Czechoslovak specialists, that intended to ensure the national producer a leading role in
the Comecon international division of labour. The specialists’ effort to protect the
national automobile industry was motivated by the relevance for the entire engineering
sector of the hard currency revenues of export-led automobile production. The paper
argues that the rejection of the Czechoslovak project and the Comecon failure to
elaborate a coherent and technically affordable plan to establish a multilateral product
specialization within the People’s democracies, blocked for almost a decade the
modernization of automobile production in Czechoslovakia. This determined the decline
of competivness of Skoda products on capitalist markets and trapped the country’s
automobile industry in the “Fordism in one country” described by Abelshauser for the
GDR.
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/8710
ISSN: 1830-7728
Series/Number: EUI MWP; 2008/18
Publisher: European University Institute
Keyword(s): Czechoslovakia COMECON Automobile industry Fordism