The 1990s were characterized by severe turbulence in the global economy. Economic and financial crises occurred in Latin America, Middle and Eastern Europe and Asia. This analysis distinguishes between the two socioeconomic criteria "transitional" and "emerging" region. Transitional countries are former centrally planned socialist economies and emerging countries former agricultural-oriented classical developing economies with mostly a history of military or some other kind of autocratic dictatorship. The resources for the analysis are data sets regarding investment, exchange rate behavior, government finance, international liabilities of monetary authorities and inflation. The study reveals macroeconomic patterns associated with economic development in each socioeconomic region. It is shown that similar patterns are responsible for successful and non-successful performance in each region. A comparison of different regions shows many parallels between emerging economies, but only little similarity between transitional economies.