Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON or CMEA), former intergovernmental body established in Moscow in January 1949 to assist and coordinate the economic development of its members. The original members were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. Albania, admitted in February 1949, was expelled in 1961. East Germany joined in 1950, the Republic of Mongolia in 1962, Cuba in 1972, and Vietnam in 1978. In 1964 Yugoslavia became a partial member; other countries, including Angola and Ethiopia, held observer status. In 1973 Finland was the first non-Communist country to sign a cooperation agreement with COMECON. In 1975 similar agreements were signed with Iraq and Mexico.

The chief policymaking body, the Council, made up of high-level representatives of each member, usually met once a year. It also had an executive committee, which met about every three months, and a secretariat, based in Moscow. In addition, COMECON had many permanent commissions, each dealing with a specific industry. In 1971 members set up the International Investment Bank for development loans.

In its first years COMECON did little more than foster bilateral trade. After the mid-1950s it promoted economic specialization among its members; but proposals for large-scale economic integration, favoured by the Soviet Union, met stiff opposition from some countries, especially Hungary and Romania, which feared domination by more industrialized members. In the mid-1970s COMECON nations jointly financed several major projects, notably to promote mining in Cuba, Poland, and the Soviet Union and to build nuclear power facilities. During the 1980s, members were concerned primarily with increasing food production, developing high-technology industries, and improving management efficiency.

Rapid political and economic changes in the Communist world led in 1991 to the dissolution of COMECON, which the new non-Communist governments of Eastern Europe saw as an outmoded instrument of Soviet domination.