With the end of the Cold War, a basic shift in the global economy occurred. No longer could Eastern Bloc nations rely upon the Soviet Union to prop up their domestic economies. Moreover, among the Communist community of nations, Warsaw Pact-international trade was no longer regulated/dictated by the Soviet hegemon. Since 1989, roughly, the former member nations of the Soviet Union and its sphere-of-influence have been cast into the world marketplace with no safety net. The impact of this event upon their individual national economies has been extremely felt.
That impact has been felt not only in the former Soviet sphere. While the Cold War raged, the Western industrialized nations of the world competed with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World. In some cases the subsidies were direct: the U.S.S.R. propped up Cuba's economy - and the U.S. financed the Philippines'. Soviet/Nicaragua and U.S./Chile. "Marxist" Ethiopia and "democratic" Pakistan. Larger Third World Nations were able to obtain economic subsidies from both sides, notably India and Iraq. Now, with the bipolar political conflict reduced to a tenuous "New World Order" of multipolar peace, the competition among economic Sugar Daddies has virtually ceased. Third World nations have been left to fend for themselves as the former enemies lick the economic wounds they inflicted upon themselves during the Cold War.
It is important to note that both the former Soviet client states and the Third World nations share a "colonial" experience in common. In that experience, the national economies were structured under an imperialistic plan - wherein the external country dominating their local economy was concerned primarily with extracting resource wealth from the colony - not in investing time, money and care into infrastructure development.
Take the example of Poland, a former client state of the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II, Poland was ess...