 My dear students, by the year 1980, the world economic socialist system embraced one-third of the world's population but generated no more than 15% of global economic output. Dear students, at its height in the mid-1980s, the world socialist system could be set to comprise the following countries with the socialist orientation, though not all were allies of the Soviet Union. And the countries are Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mozambique, North Korea and Laos, Mongolia. Dear students, Poland, Romania, Vietnam, South Yemen, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was the part of the association. Dear students, this very system of socialism coexisted alongside the world capitalist system but was founded on the principle of cooperation and mutual assistance rather than upon competition and rivalry. Dear students, the countries involved were aimed to even out the level of economic development and to play an equal part in the international division of labor. Dear students, an important role was played by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, CMEA or COMICON. It was named as COMICON. COMICON was an international body set up to promote economic development. It involved joint planning activity, the establishment of international economic scientific and technical bodies and method of cooperation between state agencies and enterprises, including joint ventures and projects. Dear students, allied to the COMICON were the International Development Bank which was established in 1971 and the International Bank for Economic Cooperation founded in 1963 which had their counterparts in the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund in the non-socialist world. My dear students, the main task of the COMICON was plan coordination, production specialization and regional trade. In 1961 Nikita Kurshwet, the Soviet leader, put forward proposals for establishing an integrated centrally planned socialist common wealth in which each geographic region would specialize production in line with its set of natural and human resources. He further argued that the resulting document will be the basic principles of the international socialist division of labor and the same document was adopted at the end of 1961 despite objections from Romania on certain aspects. Hope you have understood the topic. Thank you very much.