Recent Economic Reform in the USSR

Abstract

The goal of my SIP project is to provide a limited but interesting descriptive outline of macroeconomic failures within the Soviet economy that have made continuous efforts at economic reform necessary. The first part of my paper is primarily a general discussion on the developments of socialism and industrialization under Stalin within the Soviet Union. It consists of a fairly straight forward assessment of the reasons why centralized planning came to be implemented within the Soviet Union.. The second part of my SIP will deal with the design and flaws of centralized planning itself and its diseconomies of managements. It will also focus on the issues of poor technical progress and of chronic low quality in the production of consumer goods. The third part of my paper will deal mainly with the sociological, political, and practical reasons for Gorbachev's recent reform efforts. In this section, I will compare the early attempts at reform under the New Economic Policy with the Gorbachev's recent reform agenda. Finally, in the concluding section, there will be a brief summary of why perestroika has failed.