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The other comments here do not mention the most important part: the fiscal recession cycles caused by publicly traded, unregulated markets. In other words, the predictable 8-year pattern of booms and busts - the creation of a speculative bubble of growth followed by that bubble popping - that defines modern Capitalist economies.

No recession or depression in recent memory has truly been caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. Instead, they are caused by our complex financial investment apparatus; they have nothing to do with the “producing and buying things” side of Capitalism and everything to do with the “Moving money around” side of it. A thing - real estate, tech startups, comic books, whatever - begins to grow in value not because it is actually worth more but because people are speculating on its future value.

This is why Uber keeps growing in valuation despite never making a profit: the people buying Uber stock are not betting on Uber making a profit, but that other people will buy Uber stock in the future, further increasing the price of the shares. This is a bubble that will eventually burst, when they run out of potential investors to keep propping up the share price - but you maximize return on investment if you jump ship at the very last moment.

The '08 housing crisis is a great example. It followed an almost identical speculative bubble, except with mortgage-backed securities.

While these things will happen to some extent in Socialist countries with market economies, there are two reasons why they hit Capitalist countries extremely hard.

The first is that modern Capitalism has made every person into their own little Capitalist. Retirement funds are tied to the stock market, rent and housing prices aren’t fixed. Ephemeral financial-sector bullshit affects ordinary people when it has no reason to.

The second is that strong regulation can prevent the worst effects on ordinary people. Socialist governments can fix prices and forgive debts in order to minimize the effects of a fiscal downturn.

Every country can have some years that are better than others. That’s just the nature of reality. Socialist countries don’t generally have recessions the same way capitalist ones do because capitalists can exploit them to increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else, so they’ve stopped being a bug and become a feature.

They can have recessions, depending on how plugged in their economy is to the broader international capitalist market. But often socialist countries don’t because the capitalist free market operates on supply and demand self-correction. This is dipping a bit into control theory and dynamic systems, but broadly, you get oscillations (business cycles) if there are delays and/or too much correction/amplification of signals. So, if there is unmet demand, it is overshot or as the market is correcting, the demand reduces, so that there is overproduction. This overshoot, is often seen as a bubble inflating and bursting.

But to get to why this can be avoided in socialist countries, we have to recognize that this is one of the few dimensions where central planning, even very flawed and crude versions, is robust. The planners can say “we have a demand of 500 units, and only 400 were delivered, increase production by 25%.” Where multiple competing enterprises could just say “There is a market for 100 more units. So expand production by a significant fraction of that (leading to the many competing firms to produce a factor more)”. Because of the lack of coordination, and the incentive to try to capture a large fraction of a market for profit, a lot of these self-correction mechanisms in capitalism overshoot their targets, causing a firm to go into bankruptcy and not pay back debts. But any form of planning can somewhat dampen that, even if fluctuations and errors can lead to some overproduction or shortfall.

What countries do you mean