What can Quantitative Analysis of Trends in Science and Technology tell us about Patterns of Transformation and Growth in the Post-Socialist Countries?

The primary aim of this book is to seek to assess how the quantitative study of one particular aspect of the growth process can help us to understand the patterns of transformation unfolding in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the CIS and the Baltic states.1 In addressing one specific question we have, inevitably, encountered a whole range of more general questions. Perhaps the most basic one is this: what should we see as the ultimate criterion of success in transition? In simpler terms, in the transition race, where exactly is the finishing line?