Development characteristics of interwar European periphery: the cases of Romania and Lithuania’s agriculture

In economic terms, the interwar European periphery was limited to underdeveloped, poor, and non-industrialized states. According to this definition, both Romania and Lithuania belonged between the two world wars to the periphery of the continent. The two countries approached the economic problem using similar instruments: radical agrarian reform, stress on exports, industrialization. Despite the industrial developments that Romania and Lithuania witnessed during the interwar years, they remained, throughout the period, essentially agrarian economies. Although both states had to start from a very under-developed agriculture that shared many similarities, Lithuania’s interwar agriculture was eventually considered ‘one of the most efficient in Eastern Europe’, while Romania’s remained highly ‘inefficient and peasant’. Using the comparative historical analysis method and a similar-systems approach, this paper compares their problems, evaluates steps taken towards their solutions and reveals the different outcomes.