Showing papers on "New Economic Policy published in 1992"

Russia and the Soviet Union then and now

Abstract: The main focus of this paper is on the process and progress of economic reform in Russia. But I start with four historical questions that bear on the current situation. How advanced was Russia in 1913? What relevance, if any, does the New Economic Policy of the 19205, or NEP, have for the current situation? Why did economic growth in the Soviet Union slow in the 1970s and 1980s? What role did Gorbachev's policies play in bringing about the final collapse of the Soviet Union? Russia's approach to reform is similar to that in several East European countries. It differs in having started with a major price liberalization, before macroeconomic stabilization was assured. I then tum to the close links between macroeconomic stabilization and enterprise restructuring that have emerged in the Russian political process, and analyze the need for an explicit industrial restructuring policy that goes beyond privatization. The paper concludes with a discussion of the interrelated questions of inter-republican trade, payments, and new currencies. I describe and evaluate the case for an inter-republican payments union or the more modest type of organization, an inter-republican payments mechanism, that is likely to emerge.

Dynamics of Policy-Making in Malaysia: The Formulation of the New Economic Policy and the National Development Policy

Abstract: (1992). Dynamics of Policy-Making in Malaysia: The Formulation of the New Economic Policy and the National Development Policy. Asian Journal of Public Administration: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 204-227.

Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet Russia

Abstract: REFORM, GLASNOST, AND A COSMOPOLITAN PUBLIC SENSIBILITY comprise a triptych in modern Russian history. Reform obviously hinged on a certain openness in public life, but the link to cosmopolitanism, in the sense of a sympathetic orientation toward foreigners and life abroad, was also powerful. From the 1850s to 1992, reform has depended on increased interchange with other nations and receptiveness to the surrounding world. Reformers looked to foreign models, foreign opinions were heard in public life, and there was a tendency to accommodate international practice in fields from banking to human rights. The reverse side of this triptych was counter-reform, xenophobia, and repression. These demons also had their day in Russia, and the affinity among them was equally strong. The issue of the country's orientation toward the world had a conspicuous place in the Soviet press during the 1920s. The experiment in market socialism of the New Economic Policy (1921) brought expanded public discussion of government policy among the leaders and some renewed foreign contacts. Yet Soviet engagement with the West remained tenuous, and Stalin and his supporters used the threat of foreign intervention at the decade's end to justify abandoning market socialism for collectivization and rapid industrialization. Western trade collapsed in 1931, partly due to the Great Depression, and the country was closed to foreign investment.' Restrictions on foreign ties and a quarantine on Western trends in literature, the arts, entertainment, and even some aspects of science followed. These policies that Stalin promoted paralleled the disintegration of international

New Economic Policies A Historical Perspective

Abstract: New Economic Policies: A Historical Perspective I G Patel While the main thrust of the New Economic Policy is no douot sound, so great has been the excitement about the new policies and the cloud of controversy surrounding them that there is great danger of our losing our sense of a proper historical perspective. Are all the new policies, for example, all that new? Is there nothing in our past behaviour and belief that is still relevant in the economic sphere? Do we need indeed to discard our entire mental baggage? What is the rationale of the New Economic Policy and what are the assumptions underlying - its superiority? And what are the prospects that reality will match the rhetoric or the theoretical rationale?

The attempt to establish the Russian accounting profession 1875–1931

Abstract: In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the rising tempo of industrialization in Russia was accompanied by the establishment of the first accounting firms. Throughout the period proposals were advanced for the formation of a professional accounting association. These efforts were unsuccessful although accounting societies were established during the last decade of the Tsarist autocracy. Following upon revolution and civil war the New Economic Policy introduced a mixed economy and a period of stability. A professional association, inspired by the example of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), was formed but suppressed with the consolidation of the Stalinist autocracy.

Glavlit, censorship and the problem of party policy in cultural affairs, 1922–28

Abstract: CENSORSHIP IN SOVIET RUSSIA as it was reorganised after the end of the civil war was not a simple process of striking out words or banning books. In the course of the 1920s it became an increasingly complex system of pre-publication control and post-publication evaluation, involving myriad party and state agencies, of which the Main Directorate on Literature and Presses (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel'stv, or Glavlit), was only the most directly involved. The censorship process, in this broad sense, was one of the most widespread and certainly the most institutionalised form of party-state involvement in cultural and intellectual affairs during the New Economic Policy (NEP). An evaluation of the extent and organisation of censorship therefore cuts to the heart of party policy in cultural affairs; and like the peasantry's tax in kind or industry's khozraschet, a relatively non-interventionist or 'liberal' cultural policy has long been considered one of the cornerstones of NEP.' Censorship, as an inherently controversial act, put Glavlit at the centre of a political process in which party leaders and agencies clashed, intervened in Glavlit's affairs or attempted to impose their own version of proper party policy. Examining the politics of censorship in its everyday practice, as a result, illustrates differences of opinion in the party on censorship and the regulation of culture. Party policy was, needless to say, not simply shaped by the results of the heated Bolshevik debate in the 1920s; it was the product of the concrete actions taken by those institutions created to oversee cultural production, of which Glavlit was the most important. Issues connected to censorship and many other sensitive topics were rarely discussed in public or in print in the 1920s. The debate about policy that survived in published sources-mostly centred around the important but limited literary dispute between 'proletarian' writers and 'fellow-travellers'therefore became one of the major issues commanding scholarly attention. As a result, the complex issue of party policy has frequently been reduced to references to the celebrated 1925 Central Committee resolution on literature, itself often simplified to the statement that the party would not support any one group or faction but encourage diversity.2 The widespread notion that NEP was a time of liberal cultural policies, mild censorship and party neutrality in cultural politics persisted both because NEP was undeniably an intellectually dynamic period and because the comparison with what occurred next was so favourable. For those examining primarily the cultural achievements of the period, it became

Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union: Victim or villain? Prostitution in post-revolutionary Russia

Abstract: One of the posters produced in the early 1920s by the Moscow Provincial Soviet of Trade Unions shows a grim industrial town, and a crowd of downtrodden women shuffling from left to right, shawls round their shoulders, kerchiefs over their heads; in the foreground a group of plump men of the bourgeoisie stand and leer. Its central characters are a young man and a young woman: he, disproportionately large, holds in his left hand a hammer, sign of his membership of the proletariat; she, small-scale and dejected, is clearly in need of assistance – and indeed, the worker is holding out his free arm to her in a gesture of fraternal solicitude. The text reinforces this visual image of the prostitute as victim: ‘By destroying capitalism the proletariat destroys prostitution. Prostitution is a great misfortune for humanity. Worker take care of the woman worker.’ The date of publication was 1923, two years after the introduction of the New Economic Policy; the country was still recovering from the economic and social chaos of revolution, civil war and famine, and for the working class faced with a housing crisis, low wages and high unemployment, life was hard. It was particularly hard for women, many of whom had to support themselves and their families in conditions of a shrinking job market. The alarming level of redundancies among the female labour force appeared, albeit as a minor item, on party and trade union agendas.

The ideas of Nikolai Bukharin

Abstract: Bukharin as an economist, Alec Nove Bukharin and the new economic policy, Peter Ferdinand "Bukharin's alternative" for the countryside, V.P. Danilov Bukharin and the state, Neil Harding Bukharin's international alternative, Anna di Biagio Bukharin's theory of cultural revolution, John Biggart Bukharin and science policy, Robert Lewis Bukharin and Stalinism

The American economy from the great crash to the Third Industrial Revolution

Abstract: Part 1 Since the great crash: the Great Crash and the Great Depression the economy at war postwar America affluence at mid-century Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society the world's energy crisis and Nixon's New Economic Policy the Reagan revolution. Part 2 Some critical economic and social needs: the business system the physical environment - roads, bridges, water, acid rain the social environment - education, health care, women, and jobs. Part 3 The third industrial revolution: the third industrial revolution and our economic future the new global order.

Is There Life after Mahalanobis? The Political Economy of India's New Economic Policy

Abstract: Economic growth both in its normative theoretical and its operational policy aspects was a lifelong concern of Sukhamoy Chakravarty's. The last twenty years of his life were occupied with the guiding of the Indian economy from the very top level. Those who had known him before 1970 could not have predicted that the retiring, scholarly Sukhamoy would become a busy economic confidante of Prime Ministers. But if he did do so, it was surely because of his conviction in the basic correctness of the Nehru-Mahalanobis path for the nurturing of a just developing economy. But as we face the reality today, it is the Nehru-Mahalanobis path that is under the threat of abandonment. The [yet another] New Economic Policy is a firm rejection of many of the elements of that strategy. In this essay, I wish to analyse the reasons for the rejection of the Nehru Mahalanobis path and see if the strategy currently under implementation offers a feasible alternative. To anticipate may conclusion, I argue that the N/M path became untraversable partly due to its own inherent inconsistency and even more due to the changes in the nature of capitalism and the debacle of Leninist socialism. I shall take it that the essentials of the N/M path are agreed upon [Chakravarty (1987)] Starting as early as 1938 and the establishment of the National Planning Committee of the Indian National Congress by Subhash Bose as its then President under the secretaryship of Nehru, the main lines of the strategy for the development of the Indian economy were well laid and almost universally agreed to. The need was for industrialisation with eventual self sufficiency though not autarky, as the goal. The State was to play the pivotal role both in planning and via the ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy. There was to be a regulation of the unbridled play of market forces and there was to be equity in the distribution of income. Land reform was essential to raise productivity in agriculture as well as for economic justice. The fragmentation of land which hindered the use of machinery was to be overcome by a cooperative pooling of land plots voluntarily by the tenant cultivators who were to become owners thanks to the land reform [Nehru (1946)].

Development of a New Economic Policy Paradigm in West Germany in the 80’s?

Abstract: Market-oriented economic policies helped rebuild Germany’s economic strength after the Second World War. This period was closely associated with Ludwig Erhard, long-time Minister of economics in the conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Demand management and macropolicies were rather unpopular and indeed hardly discussed in this period. When the CDU allowed the Social Democrats (SPD) into government in 1966, at the time of the first major post-war recession in West Germany, the ground was prepared for a more activist economic policy. For nearly two decades German economic policy followed a moderate Keynesian line. The general political acceptance of demand management policies was to a large degree due to their success in overcoming the 1966/67 recession, when Keynesian ideas on deficit spending were applied for the first time. Under the influence of this favourable experience the Promotion of Economic Stability and Growth Act was passed, establishing a framework for the regular application of demand-management policies (this act is still in effect).

Technological Change in the USSR and the Return to a Market Economy

Abstract: The recent collapse of so‐called socialist economies has raised fundamental questions about whether a socialist economy could be built on imported capitalism. Russia′s socialist development was based, from the beginning, on Western capitalist technology from the time of its introduction in the late nineteenth century; the manner of this attempt may account for socialism′s premature demise. Could a socialist system be built in an economy that has not undergone a sufficient capitalist transformation? Lenin′s New Economic Policy is regarded by some as the step intended to fulfil this condition. But before it had reached its mature phase, Stalin′s “Industry First Approach” with the help of technology from mature capitalist economies, but of course under strict socialist control of production and distribution, misled the direction of the socialist transformation of Russian society. Will socialist economic development with imported technology inevitably end up in a free enterprise economy, as is happening in th...

Russia and the Soviet Union Then and Now

Abstract: The main focus of this paper is on the process and progress of economic reform in Russia. But I start with four historical questions that bear on the current situation. How advanced was Russia in 1913? What relevance, if any, does the New Economic Policy of the 19205, or NEP, have for the current situation? Why did economic growth in the Soviet Union slow in the 1970s and 1980s? What role did Gorbachev's policies play in bringing about the final collapse of the Soviet Union? Russia's approach to reform is similar to that in several East European countries. It differs in having started with a major price liberalization, before macroeconomic stabilization was assured. I then tum to the close links between macroeconomic stabilization and enterprise restructuring that have emerged in the Russian political process, and analyze the need for an explicit industrial restructuring policy that goes beyond privatization. The paper concludes with a discussion of the interrelated questions of inter-republican trade, payments, and new currencies. I describe and evaluate the case for an inter-republican payments union or the more modest type of organization, an inter-republican payments mechanism, that is likely to emerge.

Keynes and the economic policies of the 1980s

Abstract: Part 1 Surveys: Keynesian theory - is it still a useful tool in the economic reality of today?, James Tobin the development of Keynesian macroeconomics, Bennet T. McCallum the reconstruction of Keynesian economics - works in progress, Alberto Cassone. Part 2 The debate: introduction, Rainer S.Masera has the reaction against Keynesian policy gone too far?, Walter Eltis. Part 3 The economic policies: the US economy in the 1980s and beyond, Olivier Blanchard and Rudiger Dornbushc Japan's economic and industrial policy in the 1980s, Ryutaro Komiya and Mutsunori Irino development of a new economic policy paradigm in West Germany in the 80s? Norbert Walter French economic policy in the 80s, Jean Paul Fitoussi and Pierre Alain Muet has Mrs Thatcher changed the British economy?, Andrea Boltho and Andrew Graham the Italian economy in the 70s and 80s, Carlo d'Adda and Bruno Salituro.

India's New Economic Policy: Its Immediate Impact

Abstract: The new economic policy was introduced in 1991. A short review of the changes it has effected in foreign collaborations, foreign trade and public sector divestment is given. This is contrasted with the QR (Quantitative Restrictions) policy formerly adopted by India for 40 years. This enables one to get a historical perspective.