  The transition of several East and Central European countries and the
countries of the Former Soviet Union from the socialist economic system to the
capitalist one is studied. A recently developed microeconomic model for the
personal income distribution and its evolution and a simple functional
relationship between the rate of the per capita GDP growth and the attained
level of the per capita GDP are used to describe the transition process. The
developed transition model contains only three defining parameters and
describes the process of real GDP per capita evolution during the last 15
years. It is found that the transition process finished in the Central European
countries several years ago and their economic evolution is defined by pure
capitalist rules. In the long run, this means that the future of these
countries has to follow the same path, i.e. dependence on the per capita GDP
growth rate of the per capita GDP itself, as the developed countries have had
in the past. If the best GDP evolution scenario occurs for the studied
countries, they will be able to maintain the absolute lag in per capita GDP
relative to most developed countries including the USA. But they will never
catch the advanced countries if they follow the same rules of development. In
Russia and some countries of the Former Soviet Union the transition process is
still far from complete.
