Expanding the pool of knowledge: Learning from the Soviet Economy at the UN Regional Commission for Europe and beyond

This article explores how staff at the UN Regional Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) tried, with mixed success, to incorporate Soviet knowledge and experts into their activities and how these challenging efforts, paradoxically, created a space in which economics could be a shared language of communication across the Cold War divide, both within UN spaces and in adjacent academic networks. This conceptual move allowed economics knowledge to pool between East and West, even though the divide between the blocs was originally expressed in economic terms. In the 1960s, with the global transformations of decolonisation, the ECE’s experts, including those embedded in British academic networks, worked to export their shared knowledge beyond Europe, using the triangulated international space of the UN to promote – and continue gathering – economic information from the Soviet Union.