Soviet and East European Energy Crisis: Its Dimensions and Implications for East--West Trade

摘要

The world energy crisis has placed tremendous pressure on Soviet planners to divert oil destined for Eastern Europe to hard currency markets (or in some cases to charge Eastern Europe hard currency for the oil); and this pressure would have come irrespective of developments in Soviet energy-production costs. The Soviet-East European energy crisis is also political in nature because the increase balance-of-payments problems for Eastern Europe, which will cause austerity measures in the East European countries, measures which the population seems likely to resist. Thus, the Soviet-East European energy crisis is both related and unrelated to the energy crisis we face in the United States. The purpose of this paper is to project to 1980 the aggregate energy balance in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and to explore the implications of that projection for East--West trade. The year 1980 is not very far away; it would be prefereble if the projection could go farther. But the technique used here is simple extrapolation with some educated guesses concerning growth rates. Such techniques tend to work quite well for the near future; over the longer term the only hope is to actually model the processes involved and their interconnections. 18 references and footnotes. (ERA citation 04:036614)