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The USR: Toward a Common Market
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18794 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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12 / 1991 |
3,048 Words |
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Interview With Leonid Abalkin, James Millar, and Paul Craig Roberts
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The World & I: How quickly should the new market reforms be introduced? Should the former Soviet state industries be told to sink or swim?
Paul Craig Roberts: My opinion of the reform process in the Soviet Union has changed since I addressed the Academy of Sciences in June 1989. At that time I thought it was still possible to have a formal reform process led by government legislation and policies. I don't believe I any longer think that the transformation of the Soviet economy will come essentially from government actions. It appears to me that there is an informal transformation of that economic system. It is in advance of the laws. Large numbers of people, many of whom are accustomed to exercising authority, have traditionally controlled state resources and state budgets. Now they are assuming the role of owners. They are acting as if they were owners.
They are often acting without legal sanction, but it appears to be accepted. So we have basically the development of an informal economic system resulting from the autonomous actions of large numbers of people. Resources are simply being reorganized outside the official economy. They are being reorganized by the unofficial economy and distributed in unofficial ways so that we have arising an unofficial, de facto process of privatization.
Now this process, I believe, has always characterized the Soviet economy. Even during the main period of the state economy, large numbers of managers of state enterprises could not rely on the official delivery system to deliver the needed inputs on time or in the right quantity.
So in order to meet their gross output targets, they were forced to develop informal supply mechanisms. Within the official planned economy, there was always a large unofficial element of people taking actions outside the rules to supply themselves so they could make their output targets.
Now during the Gorbachevian period, it seems to me, one of its main characteristics was that this innovative leader developed new political institutions that were able to challenge the jurisdiction of the Kremlin within the republics, for example, even within Moscow and Leningrad the competing jurisdictional claims of Soviet republic and local governments essentially paralyzed all government. Thus the unofficial privatization process accelerated.
So today we have what we in the West call
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