Editor's Introduction

Abstract

The contrast between "extensive" and "intensive" sources of economic growth has often been used (both by Western and Soviet economists) to distinguish between traditional and more recent Soviet growth strategies. The lead article in this issue by Abel Aganbegian, apparently one of Gorbachev's principal economic advisers, spells out the empirical grounds for current reliance on "intensive" growth policies and suggests some of the institutional mechanisms that will be used to implement them. An unavoidable slowdown in the expansion of labor and capital inputs means that Soviet economic growth targets can only be met by substantial increases in the productivity of these inputs. Some idea of the enormity of the task is suggested by the planned increase in the annual growth of labor productivity: from 4 percent in the current five-year plan to 7 percent in the nineties. Hence the urgency of a "transition from old generations of technology to new ones, from existing to fundamentally new technological systems. â¦" One of the organizational forms that are expected to facilitate such a transition are "large-scale science-production associations," which will combine "under one roof" the functions of research, design, experimentation, and production. These are the organizational structures which are expected to promote the "integration of science and production." In effect, Aganbegian is stressing the urgency of developing institutional structures that will accelerate technological innovation, something which in the view of Western observers the traditional Soviet planning system has failed to encourage (see, for example, the interview with Abram Bergson in >i>Challenge>/i>, September/October, 1987).