East Germany
East Germany’s industrial planning was based upon a set of monopolistic cartels (Kombinate), which had considerable autonomy in carrying out the tasks of satisfying the needs of domestic customers and of export markets. Perhaps because of traditional German organizational skills and work ethic, the system was more efficient in operation than those of most other countries in the Soviet bloc. It remained woefully inefficient by the standards of the free-market economies of western Europe, however, as became clear following West Germany’s historic unification with East Germany in 1990. When deprived of their state subsidies, most eastern German industries proved unable to survive in free competition with those of western Germany or with other European Community countries. As a result, eastern Germany’s rapidly shrinking industrial sector quickly came to depend on subsidies from the German government and on massive new plant investment by corporations based in western Germany.
Romania
Of all the Soviet-bloc nations, it was Romania that most fully retained Stalinist methods, both in the economy and in politics, into the 1970s and ’80s. Unsound economic policies led to a long-lived situation of crisis and acute shortages, especially of energy and even of food. The resulting widespread deprivation sparked a popular uprising in 1989 that overthrew Romania’s longtime leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu. But, as in some other eastern European nations, the end of communist rule in Romania was followed by a sharp economic decline: the closing of unprofitable state-supported industries resulted in falling production and rising unemployment, while shortages of food and other consumer goods continued and even worsened.
Hungary
In 1968 Hungary adopted a system of market socialism that left each enterprise management very largely free to determine its own production program. The central planners were no longer to set obligatory production targets. While some prices remained controlled, others were set free. Enterprises were also given some freedom to buy and sell abroad, and efforts were made to link Hungarian prices with those on world markets. Profits became the principal measure of managerial success, and bonuses based on profits had an appreciable effect on managers’ and workers’ incomes. Large-scale investments were still controlled by the central planners, but the enterprises were required to finance roughly 40 percent of all investments out of their own resources.
Balance of payments difficulties and internal pressures (e.g., for subsidies to unsuccessful enterprises), however, led to severe strains, and output and living standards stagnated after 1978. Agriculture, however, dominated by genuinely autonomous cooperatives and a flourishing private sector, continued to do well. Hungary also had a sizable “second economy,” with a variety of legal small-scale private enterprises.
Yugoslavia
The Yugoslav communists developed their own conception of socialist planning after their break with Moscow in 1948. The collectivization of agriculture was abandoned in the early 1950s. The control of the state-owned enterprises was given to workers’ councils that would decide their own production programs according to profitability, with prices subject to negotiation. Investments were partly controlled by the enterprises themselves out of profits or by the central planners, partly financed from bank credits. But lack of effective central control, and rivalries between national republics, gave rise in the 1980s to a serious economic crisis led by a rapidly rising rate of inflation. These economic difficulties foreshadowed Yugoslavia’s breakup in the early 1990s.
China
Chinese communist planning at first followed the Soviet pattern. In 1958, however, came the Great Leap Forward, an effort to speed up progress by shifting rural manpower into manufacturing. This failed disastrously, and the Chinese communist leadership had to devise its own planning methods, adapted to a vast country with poor communications and a low stage of economic development. After the social-political cataclysm known as the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s and launched a major shake-up of the system. Agriculture was decollectivized, small-scale private trade and workshops were legalized, and the role of market forces was substantially increased. Larger-scale industry remained subject to central planning controls, though there too market-type reforms were experimented with. While there were successes, balance of payments problems and inflationary pressures continued to cause some anxiety. Agricultural output rose sharply at first, but concern over shortfalls in cereals production continued. In China too the search went on for the elusive optimal balance between plan and market.
Assessment of Soviet-type planning
The Soviet type of planning grew up under the special conditions prevailing in the U.S.S.R. and was adapted to the task of speedy industrialization of a poor country, with strong emphasis on heavy industry, explicable partly by the logic of industrialization (steel and machinery are more conducive to industrial growth than textiles and jam), partly by concern for military potential. The system made it easy for the authorities to attain a high rate of forced saving and investment and a rapid buildup of basic industries, though at the cost of neglecting for many years the elementary needs of the citizens. Insofar as the investment plans of most basic industries depended in the last resort on a quantitative estimate of future demand, the Soviet system was reasonably well adapted to making such estimates, since so much of the additional demand was a consequence of the planners’ own decisions.
In practice, of course, Soviet-type planning was not always able to realize these potential advantages. There were repeated instances of overinvestment, followed by the abandonment or freezing of partly finished projects. Experience also showed that the separate administrative units into which a nationalized economy must be divided can take as narrow and short-term a view as any capitalist entrepreneur. Thus, the most easily accessible forests were cut, the richest sources of iron ore exhausted, and fallow land put under the plow in order to fulfill current plans, with little consideration of the consequences. A centralized system of material balances is not insurance against erroneous forecasting. The material-balances approach exercised a conservative influence, perhaps because it was simplest to plan on the assumption that the various technical coefficients would remain constant. Innovation was often resisted, and the influence of user demand was weak. It must be borne in mind, of course, that Western economies also have many imperfections. A theoretical model of centralized planning works as smoothly and as efficiently as a theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market, but neither exists in the real world.
Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet economic system was presented with new problems. It showed itself unable to cope effectively with the finer adjustments required in a sophisticated industrial economy. In particular, the system was not able to stimulate the adoption of new technology despite heavy expenditure on research. It dealt very clumsily with the satisfaction of consumer demand, though this became more important in the changed political conditions, not only in the Soviet Union but also in most of its European allies. The unsuitability of the traditional Soviet planning model in a modern, highly technological, and intensely competitive world economy became painfully clear to the generation of Soviet leaders who came to power in the mid-1980s. But their efforts to incorporate with socialist planning the flexibility and grass-roots enterprise that come with market mechanisms also failed, largely because central planning had become indissolubly tied to the totalitarian structure of state power in the Soviet Union.