Growth rate of the GDP per capita revisited. 4. East European countries

In this section, we present 4 East European countries: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Their behavior and overall performance is similar to those demonstrated by Russia with a break in the GDPpc growth in the 1990s. Romania is likely an outlier with a total GDPpc increase by a factor of 12, which is an example of outstanding performance. It is likely that the start GDPpc value of $1605 is heavily underestimated considering that neighboring Bulgaria has $4642 at the same time. There are East European countries with data available from later dates. They are not included in this study.   

There are other regions not specifically covered in this study. In Africa, we selected only Morocco and South Africa for further analysis. Malaysia is an intensively growing economy and it is used in addition to China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. The main goal of this study is to demonstrate that the growth in GDP per capita is a linear and stationary process. When the stationary regime is violated, only the countries with exceptional conditions (most often oil and gas) can grow faster than the biggest economies in this world like the USA, Germany, and the UK. The non-stationary regime in other countries results in severe underperformance as observed in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The highest responsibility of the state elites in such countries is to create conditions for stationary evolution and to avoid non-equivalent exchange with the most developed countries. Both tasks are connected since the biggest powers intentionally create non-stationary to push through the non-equivalent exchange. 

 

Figure 1. Bulgaria. The upper panel: the annual GDPpc increment between 1961 and 2018 with the average value for the studied period of $238 (2011 prices). The middle panel: the same annual increment as a function of GDPpc level. The lower panel: the relative growth rate of the GDPpc as a function of the GDPpc.

 

Figure 2. Same as in Figure 1 for Hungary.

 

Figure 3. Same as in Figure 1 for Poland.

 

Figure 4. Same as in Figure 1 for Romania.