Individual service providing as an economic practice in late communist Czechoslovakia

The article examines the economic practice of individual service providing in communist Czechoslovakia from 1965 to 1989. It analyses changes in its legal regulation which occurred in years 1965, 1983 and 1988, and examines one unimplemented reform draft from 1989 which sought to establish a different form of state economic governance over individual businesses. It gives a quantitative account of individual service providing in the 1980s, as well as an insight into the spectrum of business areas individual providers operated in. The quantitative analysis draws on public statistical evidence and scattered archival sources, mainly from the East Bohemian region in the 1980s.