Jörg Roes­ler was born in Berlin in 1940. From 1959 to 1964 he studied econo­mic history at Humboldt Univer­sity in Berlin and from 1974 to 1991 he was head of depart­ment at the Insti­tute for Econo­mic History of the Academy of Scien­ces of the GDR, which was foun­ded by Jürgen Kuczyn­ski in 1955.

In his exten­sive publi­ca­tion acti­vity after 1990, Roes­ler has devo­ted hims­elf to the contex­tua­li­sa­tion and evalua­tion of the deve­lo­p­ment of the DDR’s plan­ned economy, with a special focus on the reform attempts of the so-called “New Econo­mic System of Plan­ning and Manage­ment” (NÖSPL) of the 1960s.