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Some Recent Changes in Soviet Economic Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert W. Campbell
Robert W. Campbell
Affiliation:
Department of Economics at the University of Southern California
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Extract

SOVIET economic policy in the few years since Stalin's death has been characterized by flamboyance and ferment. In an attempt to free economic growth from the bottleneck of stagnation in agriculture, Khrushchev has sponsored some extravagant gambles in corn-growing and in expansion of the sown acreage. Policy toward the consumer has gone through two complete reversals: the regime at first experimented with offering the population an improvement in the standard of living, but is now once again asserting that abundance in the future requires austerity today. Perhaps the most startling innovation of all emerged in the past year when the regime began to develop a program of foreign economic assistance as a weapon in its economic competition with the capitalist part of the world. Because of their spectacular nature, these shifts of policy have attracted considerable attention in the West and have been commented on at length. Aware diat the Soviet Union is expanding her economic power at a more rapid rate than are the capitalist countries, Western students of the Soviet economy have sought in these policy changes-some clue as to whether its rate of growth is likely to decline or to be maintained in the future. The early indications of a rise in standards of living that would cause a reduced growth of heavy industry and so a decline in investment and in the rate of growth have now been dispelled. The inability of Soviet agriculture to provide an expanding food supply for a growing work force certainly appears to be a real threat to industrial growth, and with die failure of Khrushchev's gambles, this threat remains. Thus the evidence as to the over-all effect of these changes on the rate of expansion of die Soviet economy is still inconclusive.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , October 1956 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1956

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References

1 For a description of some of these techniques, see Berliner, Joseph S., “The Informal Organization of the Soviet Firm,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXVI, No. 3 (August 1952), pp. 342–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Izvestiia, February 11, 1955, and Pravda, July 18, 1955.

3 Pravda, February 24, 1956.

4 “O sisteme pokazatelei narodnokhoziaistvennogo plana” (“On the system of indices in the national economic plan”), Planovoe Khoziaistvo (Planned Economy), No. 5 (1954), p. 60.

5 For typical examples, see the report of the 1955 conference of bookkeepers in Bukhgalterskii Uchet (Bookkeeping Account), Nos. 7 and 8 (1955), and the speeches at the 1955 conference on industrial planning in Pravda, May 17–18, 1955.

6 Bukhgalterskii Uchet, No. 10 (1954), p. 5.

7 Pravda, December 22, 1955.

8 Current Digest of the Soviet Press, VII, No. 20 (June 29, 1955), p. 22.

9 Den'gi i Kredit (Money and Credit), No. 9 (1955), p. 5.

10 Pravda, July 17, 1955.

11 The best discussion of the issues in this debate is found in Grossman, Gregory, “Scarce Capital and Soviet Doctrine,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXVII, NO. 3 (August 1953), pp. 311–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 “Itogi diskussii ob opredelenii ekonomicheskoi effektivnosti kapital'nykh vlozhenii v promyshlennosti SSSR” (“Summary of discussion on the determination of the economic effectivity of capital investments in Soviet Union industry”), Voprosy Ekonomiki (Questions of Economics), No. 3 (1954), pp. 99–113.

13 The criticism concerned the formula for figuring the cost savings in projects producing joint products. Ibid., p. 107.

14 See, for instance, the speech by Khrushchev in Pravda, February 15, 1956; the speech by Bulganin in ibid., February 22, 1956; and the speech by Pervukhin in ibid., February 23, 1956.

15 Ibid., January 15, 1956.

16 DeWitt, Nicholas, Soviet Professional Manpower, Washington, D.C., 1955.Google Scholar

17 Pravda, May 20, 1955.

18 For a most outspoken example, see the editorial in Kommunist, No. 10 (1955), pp. 3–12. This editorial even suggests that the depreciation norms should be set high enough to include an allowance for obsolescence.

19 Voprosy Ekonomiki, No. 6 (1955), pp. 12–13.

20 Ibid., p. 13.

21 Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., 11, p. 291, and XXVIII, p. 277.

22 Konson, A., “Nekotorye voprosy analiza ekonomicheskoi effektivnosti vnedreniia novoi tekhniki” (“Some questions on the analysis of the economic effectivity of introducing new technique”), Vestnik Statistiki (Statistical Journal), No. 5 (1955), pp. 3–11.Google Scholar See also Pravda, September 16, 1955.