As I was leaving Berlin less than a week before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and as celebrations there were going strong, I decided to look at the balance sheet of "transition" countries (even if the term is no longer fully adequate) over the past quarter century.

I am originally from one of them (Serbia) and I worked on most of them in the 1990s at the World Bank. I discussed and documented the resulting Great Depression those countries experienced post-communism in my 1998 book "Income, inequality and poverty during the transition to market economies." So I was going back over familiar terrain.

What naturally comes to mind to an economist is to look first at how these countries have done in terms of economic growth. For clarity's sake, let's group these countries — and call "clear failures" those countries that as of 2013 are still to reach the level of real income achieved back in 1990 (as measured by real GDP per capita).