This group can include the republics of the former Soviet Union, as well as a number of countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Romania, Bulgaria, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, as well as in Asia – Mongolia. Four states in the world remain still socialist, they are also included in this group: China, Vietnam, North Korea and the Republic of Cuba.
After the collapse of the USSR and the socialist camp in the early 90s, most countries of this group underwent fundamental changes in politics and the economy. The transformation was extremely painful and led to a sharp decline in economic activity, a drop in the level of production, real incomes of the population in all countries with economies in transition. The number of unemployed increased. The processes of transformation in these countries go beyond the standard reforms, since they are deep and systemic in nature. Reforms are more successful in the leading countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and they can already be attributed to countries with an average level of development of capitalism. These are the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland and Slovakia. However, in this group there are also rather backward countries approaching the poverty level of developing countries. These are, first of all, Mongolia and Albania, the former republics of Central Asia.
The socialist countries that make up this group differ sharply from each other not only in the size of their territories, population and economic potential, but also most of all in the scale and models of socio-economic transformations.
Reforms are especially successful in the PRC: the country occupies a unique place in the world economy, building a symbiosis model of a market and planned-regulated economy.
Similar market reforms are carried out by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The Republic of Cuba and the DPRK are in fact the only countries in the world that have preserved a centrally planned economy.
Of course, the world economy is not limited to the totality and interaction of the above-mentioned global centers of power, new industrial, developing countries, etc. In the economic arena, there are many unmentioned states that occupy their functional niches.
At the present stage, in the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution, there is a further stratification of the socio-economic space at all hierarchical levels.
The content of this process lies, firstly, in the assignment to post-industrial countries of elite functions related to the main directions of the NTP; secondly, in the transfer of the so-called semi-periphery (to the countries of medium-developed capitalism and the newly industrialized countries) of secondary, industrial functions, partially designed to meet the needs of privileged countries in ordinary, traditional industrial products and even in the products of some knowledge-intensive industries; and finally, thirdly, in the conservation of few prestigious raw material functions beyond the periphery of the world economy – by developing countries.
In the first part of the textbook, we will consider in more detail the economy of the most developed countries of the world, the so-called “big seven”.