Session 17 Ecophysiology

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Why Did the Soviet Economic System Collapse: Two Schools of Thought

The paper examines two prevalent schools of thought explaining the deterioration of the economy and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system. The first explanation places the blame on Gorbachev's poorly designed perestroika which destroyed the well functioning central planning system without creating a workable alternative. The second school of thought maintains that the Soviet variety of Marxian socialism has never been a viable system and carried its own seeds of destruction. According to this view the collapse of the Soviet Union would have happened sooner or later with or without Gorbachev because of the cumulative effect of allocative errors of the planning system.

The Second Economy and the Destabilizing Effect of Its Growth on the State Economy in the Soviet Union, 1965-1989

The authors suggest that the rapid growth of the illegal underground economy in 1970s and 1980s has destabilized the Soviet state economy and weakened the mechanism of central planning. This hypothesis is advanced on the basis of the examination of striking decline in income (legal) elasticities of demand for a number of consumer goods purchased in state retail trade in Russia and Ukraine. The growth of income from illegal sources and purchases of consumer goods in black markets explains this phenomenon.

Soviet dynamic input-output models of the U.S. economy /

Bibliography: p. 19-21.Mode of access: Internet