Part I. Introduction: 1. From centrally planned economy to capitalist avant-garde? The creation, collapse, and transformation of a socialist economy Harmut Berghoff and Uta Balbier; 2. From the Soviet occupation zone to the new Eastern states: a survey André Steiner; Part II. Beginnings, Crises, and Reforms: The Planned Economy, 1945-71: 3. Winner takes all: the Soviet Union and the beginnings of central planning in Eastern Germany, 1945-9 Burghard Ciesla; 4. National socialist autarky projects and postwar industrial landscape Rainer Kalsch; 5. Innovation and ideology: Werner Hartmann and the failure of the East German electronics industry Dolores L. Augustine; 6. East German workers and the dark side of Eigensinn: divisive shop-floor practices and the failed revolution of June 17, 1953: the political and economic effects of shop-floor practices, 1945 Andrew I. Port; Part III. Living Beyond One's Means: The Long Decline, 1971-89: 7. From schadenfreude to going-out-of-business sale: East Germany and the oil crises of the 1970s Ray Stokes; 8. Innovation in a centrally planned economy: the case of the Filmfabrik Wolfen Silke Fengler; 9. Debt, cooperation, and collapse: East German foreign trade in the Hoenecker years Ralf Ahrens; 10. Ulbricht's and Hoenecker's Volksstaat? The common economic history of militarized regimes Jeffrey Kopstein; Part IV. Transformation, Subvention, and Renewal, 1989-2010: 11. The East German economy in the twenty-first century Michael C. Burda; 12. The social policy of unification and its consequences for the transformation of the economy in the new Eastern states Gerhard A. Ritter; 13. German economic unification: a view through the lens of the postwar recovery Holger C. Wolf.