I would consider only managing to not fall even further behind a relative failure.
The paper I’ve linked to so many times deals with this converge question. There seems to be no evidence for any kind of global economic convergence—or any worldwide correlation between economic levels and economic growth—you seem to only converge to levels of your geographically close trading partners. East Germany mostly traded with countries even poorer than itself. West Germany traded mostly with very rich countries.
Of course you could ask question like “so why didn’t the trade more with the Western Europe and USA etc.”, but you could be asking the same question about Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, New Zealand, and countless other countries which did worse than Communist average.
Overall, evidence for Communism being an economic failure is shockingly underwhelming relative to how widely and strongly it is believed.
I think recovery after war and plundering is a bit different than normal convergence. Wrecked developed nations don’t behave like developing nations of the same GDP. Since a main difference was East Germany being even more wrecked more of their GDP growth should have been of the easier rebuilding/recovery sort.
The paper I’ve linked to so many times deals with this converge question. There seems to be no evidence for any kind of global economic convergence—or any worldwide correlation between economic levels and economic growth—you seem to only converge to levels of your geographically close trading partners. East Germany mostly traded with countries even poorer than itself. West Germany traded mostly with very rich countries.
Of course you could ask question like “so why didn’t the trade more with the Western Europe and USA etc.”, but you could be asking the same question about Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, New Zealand, and countless other countries which did worse than Communist average.
Overall, evidence for Communism being an economic failure is shockingly underwhelming relative to how widely and strongly it is believed.
I think recovery after war and plundering is a bit different than normal convergence. Wrecked developed nations don’t behave like developing nations of the same GDP. Since a main difference was East Germany being even more wrecked more of their GDP growth should have been of the easier rebuilding/recovery sort.