The Economic Role of Contracts in the Management of the Agroindustrial Complex

The strengthening of the contractual basis of interrelations in the planned management of the national economy and its structural elements is an indispensable condition for increasing the effectiveness of the entire system of management. The "Basic Directions of Economic and Social Development of the USSR in 1981-85 and the Period up to 1990" define the development of contractual relations (in particular, raising mutual interest in and responsibility for the fulfillment of contractual commitments) as one of the basic tasks in further improving economic planning work in all elements of the national economy.

Cooperation and Democratic Reforms in the Economy

M. S. Gorbachev's report "The October Revolution and Restructuring: the Revolution Continues" notes that restructuring has advanced the further intensification and development of socialist democracy as a primary task. This is the firmest guarantee of reforms in politics and economics, in that it will preclude any manner of backsliding. Cooperation is one form of democracy that has proven its viability and its social significance. Cooperation today is not only an important form of socialist self-management, but is also an effective means of developing the national economy.

Land Reform

This article examines the causes of the "muddle" that characterizes economic, legal, and business regulation of agricultural land ownership and use in present-day Russia.

Improving the Management of Agriculture

The consistent implementation of the modern agrarian policy of the CPSU, aimed at the transformation of agriculture into a highly developed sector of the economy, entails the further improvement of methods and forms of planned organization of social production. Special importance is acquired by the interconnected, comprehensive utilization of all elements of the economic planning mechanism underlying the development of agriculture and the agroindustrial complex as a whole: planning, cost-accounting incentives, and the system of interbranch relations. In accordance with the pronouncements of the July (1978) Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, this mainly requires "the elaboration of planning and incentive principles, which in the present stage would create more favorable conditions for expanded reproduction" and would "bring economic relations between branches of the agroindustrial complex into line with socialist economic principles."

Intensification of Agriculture and its Economic Effectiveness

Ensuring the greatest effectiveness of agricultural production under conditions of its intensive development is connected with a specific approach both to questions of methodology and to the execution of practical measures for increasing the return of successive expenditures. A great deal depends here upon correctly understanding the essence of intensification and the basis of the system of indices in which this complex and contradictory process finds its quantitative and qualitative expression.