Gustav Stolper, Karl Hauser, and Knut Borchardt, _The German Economy: 1870 to the Present_, trans. by T. Stolder (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). See especially around p. 200 and after. I do not have the cite on the original German version. Another source that is pretty good is V.R. Berghahn, _Modern Germany: Society, Economics and Politics in the Twentieth Century_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Almost all sources use 1939 as a base for comparison because data for the war period is simply awful. Some sources say that the two zones were essentially equal in per capita income, some say that the east was slightly ahead. I suspect that the differences within each zone betweenn Lander were greater than between the two zones overall.
Your point about wartime investment is well taken, but I have seen no data on that. One source I saw (a working paper by Holger Wolf at NYU a few years ago) claimed that in the FRG zone, capital stock was actually 16% higher in 1945 than in 1939, despite all the bombing, although there were terrible bottlenecks in transportation and communications systems due to the bombing. That was certainly the case in both zones. Certainly both zones received lots of bombing, with both Hamburg in the west and Dresden in the east getting full scale firebombings. Wolf gave no figures for the GDR zone.
It is certainly the case that the east suffered more from the disruption of internal German trade than did the west, due to its small size. But with regard to the integration issue, the GDR was integrated into the CMEA, which was also growing, if not as dramatically. I don't think the loss of the coal areas of Silesia mattered a whit. Did the Poles start charging higher prices to the steel producers and other coal users in the GDR? I don't think so. Indeed, the GDR eventually had certain gains because it was the most technologically advanced zone of the CMEA and thus came to specialize in and export certain high tech commodities such as computers. This industry pretty much went completely bust after the reunification. Of course some that had survived from the prewar period are still around, e.g. Zeiss Optical.
All in all this is a very complicated question, and there are many other issues involved. But, I would repeat that my original claim that the GDR should (or could) be viewed as a "developing country" cannot be maintained seriously. Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 5:41 PM Subject: Re: PDS on the Berlin Wall - and present walls!
> J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
>
>
> > Calling the former GDR a "developing country"
> > is a bit of a stretch. Actually, in 1939 it was probably
> > slightly ahead of the West in per capita income and
> > in its level of industrialization.
>
> Do you have a source for this?
>
> Furthermore I am not sure whether it make sense to compare the 1939
figures
> (if there are any usefull at all, administrative divisions in 1939 were
> different from the 1945 zonal divisons). In the early years of the war a
lot
> of investment took place, whats about its regional distribution? How was
it
> effected by allied arial bombings?
>
> The economic problems faced by the Soviet zone and later the GDR were
> manifold, reparations to be paid to the SU are only one aspect. BTW
> reparations to a state that was devasted by the Nazi aggression.
>
> Others problems were the almost compelete absence of heavy industry on the
> territory of the GDR. After the war it was cut off from the coal areas at
> the Ruhr and Silesia.
>
> Another problem was the traffic infrastructure. All major roads, rails and
> waterways went from East to west and not from north to south.
>
> When comapring the East and West German economy one has to keep in mind
that
> the West was much bigger than the East (e.g. a population of 60 Mio vs. 17
> Mio.). West German economy was almost immediately integrated into a
growing
> world market, while the East was cut off.
>
> Johannes
>
>