Chapter 14 - The Soviet Command Economy Flashcards
ABC of Communism
Bukharin and Preobrazhenk’s book, describing an economy in which workers collectively own the means of production, goods are kept in public warehouses, and people take what they need.
Kolkhozy
Collective farms - compulsory collectives of peasant households that delivered their products to the state at prices dictated by the state
control figures
preliminary output targets of the national plan
Economic Managers
responsible for fulfilling orders and reward or punished accordingly
funded commodoties
Funded commodities were a category of commodities considered so critical to the success of the annual plan that allocation was tightly controlled by Gosplan and the USSR Council of Ministers.
Gosplan
Russian name for the State Planning Commission
Jobs right economy
workers are guaranteed a job by the state
Labor theory of value
(Marx) value is determined by labor alone and therefore excludes interest and rent from allowable costs
money illusions
economic agents base their decisions on nominal prices and wages rather than on relative prices and real wages
New Economic Policy (NEP)
returned smaller enterprises to private ownership, legalized private trade, and introduced a tax on agriculture to replace grain requisitions
Nomenklatura
a list of responsible positions that were filled by the personnel department of the party
output plan
tells the producers what to produce and in what assortments
period of stagnation
the declining growth of the soviet economy starting in the early 1970s
petty tutelage
the constant interventions in the affairs of enterprises by superiors
ruble control
the monitoring of a plan fulfillment by monitoring the financial transaction among enterprises
savings overhang
being forced to save because there is nothing to buy
Second Economy
Either
1) the activity is engaged in for private gain
2) the person engaging in the activity knowingly contravenes the law
Soft Budget Constraint
enterprises that fail to cover their costs received automatic subsidies from the ministry, which redistributed profits from profitable to unprofitable enterprises, or from the state budget.
Stalin’s great bank
the policies Stalin put into place starting in 1929 to establish the administrative command economic and political system
Gosbank
Russian state bank - the monopoly banked that handled all enterprise transactions throughout the economy
success indicator problem
manager’s need to select which orders to fulfill among the multitude of orders they received
techpromfinplan
technical-industrial-financial plan - the enterprises plan, including output, assortment, labor staffing, and financial plans
turnover tax
a differentiated tax on consumer good that depended on the demand for the product and is the difference between the wholesale and retail price
war communism
the nationalization of most of the economy, the attempt to eliminate market relationships in industry and trade, and the forced requisitioning of agricultural products from the peasants
material balance system
balances were developed to equate the demand and supply of key industrial commodities, labor outputs, and the like
