Published by EH.Net (January 2023).Tomka. _*Austerities and Aspirations: A
Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East
Central Europe since 1945_*

Béla Tomka. *Austerities and Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth,
Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945. *Budapest
and New York: Central European University Press, 2020. xii + 445 pp. $105
(cloth), ISBN 978-963-386-351-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Marcin Piatkowski, Kozminski University in Warsaw.



Béla Tomka’s book is a welcome addition to the underdeveloped and often
neglected study of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Tomka documents the
evolution of incomes, patterns of consumption, and quality of life in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, as proxies for the whole CEE region,
and juxtaposes them against the same changes in Western Europe. The book
mostly focuses on the 1950-1990 period of communism in CEE after World War
II but covers the years after 1990 as well.

There is much to like about the book, including its approach to going
beyond GDP and focusing on the evolution of consumption and quality of
life; its wealth of detail on the changes of well-being during the
communist period, which are little known outside the region; and its
long-term and pan-European perspective, which is often missing in the
standard Western-oriented telling of European economic history. The book
also provides a useful literature review of the causes of economic
divergence between the two parts of the continent. It combines historical
statistics on income, consumption and quality of life with a largely
convincing narrative. As such, the book would be an excellent reading for
scholars interested in the CEE region, idiosyncrasies of real socialism,
and the interplay of growth, consumption, and the quality of life.

However, the book would benefit from focusing less on Western Europe and
more on CEE, better explaining how it contributes to
the existing literature, and elaborating on many important questions that
it raises but then often leaves unanswered.

First, the book covers a lot of ground that is already well known, such as
the story of the economic development of Western Europe in the 20th century.
The economic development of CEE is less well known—which is where the book
provides value—but the author’s verbatim use of widely available historical
statistics and on the whole unsurprising narrative make it difficult to
inspire a new perspective. Historical data on incomes from, for instance,
the Maddison Project Database 2020, is just one click away and there is
little need to reproduce it. Three charts on changes in
GDP, consumption, and quality of life across the continent during 1900-2015
could have easily replaced dozens of pages of tables with (most already
outdated) data. The book could have summarized the well-known history of
Western development in just a few pages and focused more exclusively on CEE
to explain what all the differences in data meant and what drove the
changes.

Second, it is not clear what the book adds relative to the
scholarly consensus. After reading through the book’s 300 pages and almost
150 pages of notes and references, one may struggle to find what is new,
beyond a few intriguing statistics (such as that “in Czechoslovakia, the
upper decile’s share of total personal income was 14 percent in 1962, which
was the lowest level of income concentration in Europe and probably in
the entire world,” p. 160). The lack of original approach is well reflected
in the author’s own largely rhetorical research questions about whether
CEE’s economic development and quality of life lagged behind Western Europe
during the 20th century (yes, it did!) and whether there was any period of
convergence and divergence (yes, there was!). It would have been useful for
the author to clearly state up front what he is trying to say and how it
may be different from what we already know.

Third, the book asks, explicitly and implicitly, multiple important
questions but largely does not elaborate on the possible answers. For
instance, the author notes that levels of consumption and quality of life
in communist CEE were lower than in Western Europe, as would be expected
given the large differences in the levels of incomes, but then argues that
they should be adjusted for multiple factors that made communist CEE
peculiar. These included, on one hand, in-kind services delivered for free
or at rock-bottom prices by the communist state (such as nurseries,
healthcare, winter and summer holidays and even tickets for theaters and
recordings of classical music), high job security, and low inequality. On
the other hand, citizens of communist countries in CEE suffered much lower
quality of products and services, permanent shortages and long wait lines
and lower incomes than what would be suggested by the often inflated
production and growth statistics. However, on balance, did these
differences increase or decrease the gap relative to Western Europe?  How
shall we account for the lack of freedom of speech, restrictions on
movement, and lack of free political representation in CEE in the
measurement of well-being? How can these factors affect the assessment of
well-being in autocracies today? While it is not easy to tackle such
questions, it would have been useful for the author to provide even
incomplete answers than not to deal with these questions at all.

In addition, the author’s choice of Western Europe as the benchmark for
communist CEE overshadows the fact that while communist countries lagged
behind Western Europe in practically every facet of development, they
nonetheless scored much higher on education outcomes, mortality, gender
equality and many other key elements of development and well-being than
what would be suggested by their levels of income. Does it mean that under
communism CEE countries “punched above their weight” in well-being? Are
there any lessons from this experience for developing countries around the
world today?

Finally, the book fails to mention that by now all four countries analyzed
in the book—Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary—as well as the rest of
the CEE region from Estonia down to Bulgaria—are all living through their
Golden Age, defined as the shortest distance in history between their
levels of incomes and quality of life and those in Western Europe. This is
surprising in view of the book’s generally useful coverage of the post-1990
period of CEE’s economic resurgence (although somewhat inexplicably for a
book completed in mid-2018 it uses data that often end in 2005 or 2010).
The book does not mention that the average GDP per capita PPP is now higher
in Czechia than in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and is just about to catch
up with Italy; or that Poland’s GDP per capita is higher than Portugal’s
and is just about to catch up with Spain’s. For a book that focuses on the
quality of life, it surprisingly fails to mention that Czechia’s level of
well-being, as reflected in, for instance, the OECD Better Life Index, is
now higher than Italy’s or that Poland’s well-being is not only higher than
Portugal’s but also higher than Japan’s and South Korea’s, even though GDP
per capita in the two latter countries is almost one-third higher. Does
this mean that CEE countries have been able to transform growing prosperity
into higher well-being more efficiently than others? If so, why and how?
And more broadly, does their economic success have anything to do with
their inclusive communist legacy, as some others, like myself, would argue?

Overall, Tomka’s book is an excellent addition to the small, albeit growing
literature that takes a pan-European approach to economic history and goes
beyond GDP to also focus on well-being. Many scholars, especially those not
familiar with Central and Eastern Europe, will benefit from reading the
book. Future research could focus on comparing the developmental experience
of CEE not with Western Europe, which has always been well ahead of CEE in
development, but with Southern Europe (Greece, Spain and Portugal), which
throughout centuries shared similar growth drivers and constraints as CEE.
Using an automotive analogy, it could be more illuminating to compare Skoda
to Fiat rather than to Porsche. Insights from such an analysis would make
CEE’s experience relevant not only to the region’s cognoscenti, but also to
a global audience.



Marcin Piatkowski is Professor of Economics at Kozminski University in
Warsaw. His book *Europe’s Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise
of Poland* (Oxford University Press, 2018) received the 2019 Polish Academy
of Sciences’ prize for Best Book in Economics.

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