Economic planning systems of communist states
centralized investment and economic input decision-making model under Leninist states
Economic planning systems of communist states is the specific model of centralized planning employed by communist states, which has its origins in the economy of the Soviet Union, and formally based on democratic centralism.
The post-perestroika analysis of the system of the Soviet economic planning describes it as the administrative-command system due to the de facto priority of highly centralized management over planning. An example of analytical approach to several stages of the Soviet political-economic model can be found in the works of Soviet economist Lev Gatovsky.
Characteristics
Institutions
The major institutions of Soviet-type planning in the Soviet Union (USSR) included a planning agency (Gosplan), an organization for allocating state supplies among the various organizations and enterprises in the economy (Gossnab) and enterprises which were engaged in the production and delivery of goods and services in the economy. Enterprises comprised production associations and institutes that were linked together by the plans formulated by Gosplan.
In the Eastern bloc countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Albania), economic planning was primarily accomplished through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), an international organization meant to promote the coordination of Soviet economic policy amongst the participating countries. The council was founded in 1949 and worked to maintain the Soviet style of economic planning in the Eastern bloc until the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991.
There is a small amount of information in state archives regarding the founding of CMEA, but documents from the Romania state archive suggest that the Romanian Communist Party was instrumental in beginning the process which led to the creation of the council. Originally, Romania wanted to create a collaborative economic system which would bolster the country's efforts to industrialize. However, the Czech and Polish representatives wanted to have a system of specialization put into place, wherein production plans would be shared amongst members, and each country would specialize in a different area of production.
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