by Peter J. D. Wiles Professor Emeritus University of London There are two sorts of writers of prefaces: the obliging and the disobliging. Surely Peter MiMlyi knows where to place me in this taxonomy. For the most part I write my own irrelevant opinions, but there was one act of gross interference: my insistence on a point he had already quietly made, the greater stability of the production of consumer goods under Communism even of food, if we exclude bad harvests. The many Marxist and some other scholars who wrote about Dr. Mih

Klappentext

The entire world was taken by surprise when 1990 brought an end to Soviet communism in Europe and thus a genuine end to World War II. The fact that these developments surprised not only the leaders and the people of the countries concerned, but also scholars is an extraordinary challenge to the students of Soviet-type economics. In the academic world, where predictive force is one of the key indicators of a successful theory, this weak performance calls into question the validity of earlier findings and interpretations. Something was wrong in the general framework. Socialist Investment Cycles offers an explanation of this failure. Socialist Investment Cycles is the first monograph in English on investment fluctuations in planned economies, a chapter in history. While providing a broad overview of the literature on socialist investment cycles, as well as a quantitative description of the actual processes, the author puts forth a new framework for understanding investment fluctuations. In this framework socialist planners were able to adjust the volume of investments without risking the fulfillment of politically more sensitive target variables. Socialist Investment Cycles encompasses all thirty-five countries which were ruled by communism and is the first study to penetrate deeply into the data problem, country by country, and series by series. Socialist Investment Cycles has been written after the collapse of Soviet-type communism in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and the countries of Asia and Africa. It thus offers a retrospective view on both the theory and practice of socialist economies.

Inhalt
and Summary of Main Points.- 1. General Framework.- 1.1 Three schools.- 1.2 Cycles or fluctuations ?.- 1.3 Socialism.- 1.4 Statistical definition of investments.- 1.5 Theory and statistical reality.- 1.6 The relevance of cycle models.- 1.7 Formalised summary.- 2. Three Schools of Thought.- 2.1 Control theory models.- 2.2 Endogenous models.- 2.3 Common elements.- 2.4 Exogenous models.- 3. Measurement of Investment Fluctuations.- 3.1 Distortion of GINV data.- 3.2 Traps of time series analysis.- 3.3 East-West comparison of GINV fluctuations.- 3.4 Synchronization of investment fluctuations.- 4. Common Patterns and Particularities - A Historical Analysis.- 4.1 The method.- 4.2 Construction output.- 4.3 Industrial output.- 4.4 Imports.- 4.5 Standard of living.- 4.6 Domestic utilization of NMP.- 4.7 Role of the harvest and foreign credits.- 5. Closing Remarks on Measurement and Control.- 5.1 The measurement trap.- 5.2 The definition trap.- 5.3 Micro-economic conditions of measurement.- Appendix I: Two Hungarian Case Studies.- 1. The impact of investment fluctuations on the labour market.- 2. Maintenance - capital repair - investment.- 3. Conclusions.- Appendix II: Basic Data.