On the economic growth in post-communist countries of Eastern Europe

The author discusses the main types of the economic growth and their application to the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The paper introduces the notion of the extremely falling behind as the variety of the falling behind when the country has no considerable stock of primary resources while the available poor technological potential is not used properly. According to the "combinatorial augmentation" concept, the paper explains why the falling behind is more characteristic of the EU's post-Communist countries than catching up. Particularly, according of the specific of the "combinatorial augmentation" process in the EU, the new technologies are mainly concentrated in some Western European and other developed countries while older technologies were mostly left for the other EU's post-Communist countries. Unfortunately, the domestic innovation systems in these countries are weakly developed. As the result, the economic growth types of other Eastern European post-Communist countries are based on coat-tail growth, falling behind and extremely falling behind. The paper shows the difference between catching up and catch-up effect. Excluding the catch-up effect is of special importance for identification of real economic growth. The method based on the hypothesis of "proportional overlap" gives a more realistic picture for the quantitative assessment of the differences between economic growth indicators concerning an effect of catch-up start and without it. In order to diagnose the type of economic growth of the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe, it is not enough to merely exclude the catch-up effect - it is necessary to use a whole system of indicators.