In the 1980s, tractors produced by Uzina Tractorul Brașov (UTB) in Brașov (Romania) became global commodities known around the world, in places like Australia, Peru, or Egipt. Producing at first for the internal market (with the collectivization of agriculture completed in April 1962, ever more tractors were needed for large farms), UTB eventually started producing for foreign markets, with as much as 80% of its production being exported in the 1970s. Its tractors were sold all over the world: in Australia, Egypt, Peru, or Turkey, under different names: Universal Farmliner, Titan, Universal, UTB, Agripak, Hattat Universal Tractors. 

The project Managing productivity challenges: a glocal story of Brașov in late socialism (GloBv.) undertakes a global micro-historical research of the in late socialism. With the help of a micro-historical lens, the project focuses on the (re)organization of the production process to attain better productivity:labour organization, factory regimes, organizational & managerial adjustments of production and labor, technological transfers, technological change, in response to the structural challenges brought by both the transition to an intensive model of economic growth in the 1960s-1970s and by the world economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s The present research is intended to operate as a microhistorical laboratory, to test and nuance the existing macro-economic explanations of the economic failure of state-socialist regimes, and to amend them by proposing different temporalities and periodizations derived from global micro-historical research.