Abstract
In Eastern Europe, skilled business people, specifically accounting personnel, are in short supply. There is a lack of competent, trained business managers. Western style management training is quite a recent development in Eastern Europe. The International Management Center (IMC) in Budapest, the oldest graduate management program in Eastern Europe, was founded in 1988. More recently the Czech Management Institute has opened near Prague with programs similar to those of the IMC. There have been no organized programs to train accountants in Eastern Europe. Consequently, virtually all of the professional accountants in Eastern Europe, since the beginning of the liberalization, are westerners who are temporarily in residence in Eastern Europe. The challenge is to develop a supply of local employees who are trained to Western standards who will carry on after the first wave of foreign employees leaves. Finally, there is a general malaise among the workforce that is a residual of 50 years of communist control.