EN
The centrally planned GDR (German Democratic Republic) economy obtained a complete institutional framework of a capitalist economy of the FRG at the moment of reunification of Germany in 1990. According to the social-economic approaches to the growth theory based on formal conception of institutions, conditions for a dynamic economic development in East Germany were created. However, the author´s case study shows that the economy of East Germany got stuck in a long-term stagnation. The growth theory of the new institutional economics based on the North's path dependency concept offers more plausible explanations of the failure of East Germany transition: important causes of the long-lasting decline in productive activities lie in the incompatibility between West Germany formal institutions and East Germany informal institutions. He believes that this approach is the most general approach to the growth theory.