The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

The breakdown of the communist regime in Eastern Europe marked a historical event for countries on both sides of the iron curtain. Applying the recently released EU KLEMS database on sectoral growth and productivity measures, we study the period after the transformational recession 1995-2004 for Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia and compare the performance to a group of European core economies. Our analysis reveals pronounced differences in performance but also striking similarities in terms of industrial structure. Beginning witha brief account of aggregate growth and its components, the focus is then on specialisation patterns and the varying contribution of industries characterised by educational intensity. Fianlly, we investigate the manufacturing sector in more detail, demonstrating that the Eastern European countries sucessfully specialised in higher-tech sectors which might be explained by high productivity growth rates in these sectors.