This research assesses the prospects of marketing coffee in Eastern Europe. The countries of Eastern Europe of greatest interest in this assessment are Rumania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Included in this assessment are discussions of economics, market size, consumer expenditures, coffee preferences, product distribution and promotion, and foreign exchange controls and import duties.
The collapse of the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe was widely interpreted as a boon for the economic welfare of all Europe. The Communist collapse, together with the increased economic integration within the European Community (EC) beginning in 1992 as a result of the implementation of the Single Act of Luxembourg, was widely heralded as the beginning of a new economic era for Europe. Lastly, the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht by the member nations of the EC was expected to usher in a new age of European political unity.
Three years after all of this unbridled optimism surfaced, however, The Economist (1992c, p. 51) referred to Europe as the "nightmare continent." Former Soviet republics are fighting with one another. Ethnic minorities in some former Soviet republics are challenging the new government. The former Yugoslav federation has slipped into a devastating civil war in Bosnia Hercegovina, where Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbs are all at work killing one another. In Czechoslovakia, a so called "velvet divorce has been negotiated between the two major ethnic groups
the Czechs and the Slovaks (The Economics, 1992c, p. 53). The divorce may not be so smooth, however, once the parties get down to dividing the country's assets. Further, strong ethnic minorities will exist in each of the two new states Germans in the Czech area and Hungarians in the Slovak area. In Poland, Hungary, and most of the other Eastern European countries, the economies are in much worse shape than they were under the former Communist system.