This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the different effects of the economic crisis from 2008, across all transition economies with a testable framework, that relates vulnerability to specific forms of development since 1989. The key to the framework is the identification of forms of integration into the international economy, with distinctions between different export structures and dependence on other sources of foreign-currency earnings. These created channels for transmission of the crisis which differed between countries. The analysis draws on a three-level research design, combining a variable-oriented regression analysis with case-oriented comparisons among similar cases, and within-case analysis of individual countries.