The economic environment is determined and influenced by many factors, such as the security situation, the price of energy resources, economic and political restrictions, etc. In this environment, companies are looking for tools that will allow them to compete and increase the company's resilience to market pressures. When analyzing economic barriers and company tools, a historical comparison with the environment of socialist Czechoslovakia was used as a method, because the period of the Cold War and the search for tools in a market-limited environment shows a set of common features