the beneficiaries are to be found in Frankfurt and Tokyo, not in Moscow.

The eastern country with by far the best labour productivity is East Germany. It also started out with a good industrial base, and it was concentrated in growth areas like precision engineering. On top of that it has shown just about the best growth in productivity due to science and technology as opposed to sheer capital size in the east. Yet a comparison of this eastern leader with an equivalent western leader like West Germany reveals the underlying weakness. The industrial output per worker in East compared with West Germany in 1967 was 72%. Yet by 1976 this had declined to 65%. In agriculture the situation was much worse, with equivalent figures of 92% in 1967falling to 61% in 1976. During this period the agricultural work force fell from 14% to 10% of the total East German labour force – i.e. the yield per hectare compared with West Germany must have fallen even faster. [36]

The widening technology gap between west and east has forced all the eastern European countries (and also China for that matter) to depend much more heavily on imported western technology, and this certainly has been the economic basis of the détente period of the middle-1970s. Even in the case of the USSR, which was more willing and able to resist this due to its size, there was a 7-fold increase from 1970–75 in its imports – mainly of high-technology precision engineering equipment – from West Germany. Yet it has