Central and Eastern Europe 

Central and Eastern Europe is a term describing former Communist countries in Europe, after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90. In scholarly literature the abbreviations CEE or CEEC are often used for this concept.1 2 CEE includes all the Eastern bloc countries west of the post-World War II border with the former Soviet Union, the independent states in former Yugoslavia (which were not considered part of the Eastern bloc), and the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — that chose not to join the CIS with the other 12 former republics of the USSR. The transition countries in Europe and Central Asia are thus classified today into two political-economic entities: CEE and CIS. The CEE countries are further subdivided by their accession status to the European Union (EU): the ten first-wave accession countries that joined the EU in May 2004 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) and the two second-wave accession countries that joined in January 2007 (Bulgaria, Romania). According to the World Bank, "the transition is over" for the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004.3

CEE includes the following former socialist countries, which extend east from the border of Germany and south from the Baltic Sea to the border with Greece:

Other former Communist countries in Europe — Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia — are members of CIS and are not included in CEE. The term Central and Eastern Europe (with its abbreviation CEE) has by now displaced the alternative term East-Central Europe in the context of transition countries, mainly because the abbreviation ECE is ambiguous: it commonly stands for Economic Commission for Europe rather than East-Central Europe.4

See also

References

  1. ^ Z. Lerman, C. Csaki, and G. Feder, Agriculture in Transition: Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-Soviet Countries, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD (2004), see, e.g., Table 1.1, p. 4.
  2. ^ J. Swinnen, ed., Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Central and Eastern Europe, Ashgate, Aldershot (1997).
  3. ^ Unleashing Prosperity: Productivity Growth in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, World Bank, Washington (2008), p. 42
  4. ^ ECE – United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
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