Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 6, Number 2—Spring 1992—Pages 137–148
Economics in the Former Soviet Union
Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy and Jim Leitzel
O
ne of the most notable, but least discussed, aspects of the halting attempts during the past six years to reform the economies of the Soviet Union, and now those of its successor states, has been the prominent role played by professional economists.1 Not since the mid-1920shas the Soviet political leadership felt so strongly the need to draw upon the expertise of the economics profession to help determine its course of action. The resurgence in the importance of economics has been reflected at the highest political levels of the USSR in the powerful posts held over the past few years by academic economists such as Leonid Abalkin, Stanislav Shatalin, Yegor Gaidar, and many others.2 At lower levels as well, economists have been leading
voices in the public debate, publishing articles in the popular press and helping to shape public opinion.
This political clout marks a major change in status of economists in the USSR. For some 60 years, until the initiation of economic reforms under
1Recent events have rendered much familiar terminology regarding the former USSR
anachronis-tic. In addition to historical references, we will, for convenience, continue to use the terms "Soviet" and "Soviet Union" to refer to the present-day Russian Federation and any other republics of the former union.
2Abalkin, a member of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences and director of the Academy's
Institute of Economics, was a deputy prime minister under Gorbachev. Shatalin, another Academi-cian, was a member of Gorbachev's Presidential Council and an author of the famous "Shatalin Plan" for economic reform. Gaidar, former director of the Institute of Economic Policy, was appointed deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin in the fall of 1991.
• Michael Alexeev is Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Clifford Gaddy is Research Associate, Foreign Policy Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D. C. Jim Leitzel is Associate Professor of Public Policy Studies, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and National Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford, California.
Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, the principal role of Soviet economists had been to explain why the policies which the state had already implemented were in fact optimal. Since the state had little desire for an accurate analysis of the incentives, costs, and benefits that accompanied a chosen policy, the approaches that Western economists find useful in making such judgments were neglected in the Soviet Union. In addition, even those economists who might have wished to analyze policy proposals were in much more difficult circumstances than their Western counterparts. The fixed prices in the Soviet state sector had produced an economy of vast distortions, resulting in an environment in which the theory of the second best held with a vengeance. In such a grossly distorted system, accurately predicting the effects of marginal policy changes was virtually impossible. The cause of the distortions—the fixed-price centrally planned economic system—was not an open issue for discussion. Today, systemic change is the major issue in the former Soviet Union, so the condition of the economics discipline has become a pressing problem. Soviet economists are being called upon, not to justify a chosen policy, but to help select the path of action.3
In this paper, we attempt to characterize the current state of economics in the former Soviet Union, investigate the implications that the condition of Soviet economics has for reform, and suggest possible future directions for the discipline. Our information comes from four main sources: professional publi-cations of Soviet and Western economists, published remarks by Soviet economists, personal interviews and discussions which we conducted with young Soviet economists in the summers of 1990 and 1991, and a questionnaire administered to Soviet economists and graduate students in the Soviet Union.
The Nature of Soviet "Economics"
Who are the Soviet economists now being called upon to make policy, and in what directions can they be expected to push the reform process? One danger for Americans in thinking about these questions is to be deceived by terminology. An individual such as Abalkin or Shatalin is in a top policy-making post, and he is an "economist." Therefore, we reason, he must have a similar mind-set as economists active in Western policy-making circles—Michael Boskin, Lawrence Summers, or Milton Friedman, say. In reality, the training of
3Åslund (1987, 1990) and Sutela (1990, 1991) describe the policy-making roles of economists since
the beginning of the Gorbachev era. See also the comments of Litwack (1988) and Grossman (1988). Sutela (1984, 1991) provides the most detailed accounts of the history of Soviet economic thought. For an overview of developments from the Revolution through the 1960s, see Treml (1969).
Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy and Jim Leitzel 139
economists in the Soviet Union and the United States is fundamentally differ-ent. The average Soviet economist has less in common with an American economist than do American economists with American sociologists or other social scientists.
Consider, for example, the economics training of one typical young Soviet mathematical economist. A recipient of a graduate degree in economic sciences from Moscow State University in 1986, he reported that he had had no exposure to the theory of the firm, industrial organization, public finance, game theory, public choice, or anything involving utility functions. Instead, the Soviet student received a thorough background in Marxism, the history of the Communist Party, and a curious hybrid of socialism and marginalism known as the "System of Optimal Functioning of the Socialist Economy" (about which more below). He may have seen or even read the works of a few Western authors—for instance, Paul Samuelson's Economics, first published in Russian in 19644—but such works are limited in number and in accessibility. He would
have been very lucky to have any access at all to mainstream Western nomics journals, while the professional papers he could read in Soviet eco-nomics journals were as different from their Western counterparts as his own graduate education was from that of a student in an American university. The result was that although this Soviet economist was trained as a professional, the profession in question was not economics—at least not as it is conceived of in the West.
Beginning at the undergraduate level, Soviet economics students followed one of two distinct tracks: political economy or mathematical economics. Politi-cal economy, a historiPoliti-cally oriented and descriptive field with (until recently) strong Marxist-Leninist ideological underpinnings, is the specialization of the vast majority of Soviet economists. Mathematical economics, on the other hand, is a highly technical discipline generally taught in a separate division of university economics departments.
While the state of the economics profession in the former USSR is largely governed by the ongoing work at leading universities and research institutes, more than 90 percent of all economists with degrees from higher educational institutions hold non-academic positions as so-called sectoral economists, as shown in Table 1.5 These include both political and mathematical economists
whose principal task is to improve productivity in their industrial sector. Sectoral economists often possess substantial institutional knowledge concern-ing technological and administrative relationships, and some computer skills,
4 The tragicomic fate of Samuelson's text in the USSR is chronicled by Gerschenkron (1978).
Gerschenkron's fascinating article is also an excellent introduction to the attitudes of Soviet economic officialdom towards Western economic thought in the 1960s and later.
5As understood in the Western sense, the category of "academic economists" would roughly include
those Soviet economists employed in the sectors of "Education" and "Science" in Table 1. Note that a majority of U.S.-trained economists also work outside academia, in either government or business (Klamer and Colander, 1990, p. 7).
Table 1
Where Do Soviet Economists Work?
(Distribution of employees of economic services by sector and educational level, in thousands, as of Jan. 1, 1989)
and thus play a role similar to either Western bookkeepers or management consultants.6
To present the flavor of research in Soviet political economy and mathe-matical economics, consider a recent and fairly representative example of a paper written in each style.
The first is an article written by two senior researchers (one a deputy director of an economics institute), entitled "The Socioeconomic Crisis as a Crisis of State Socialist Property." The article appeared in a 1990 issue of
Voprosy ekonomiki [Questions of Economics], the flagship journal of Soviet political
economy. While ostensibly an analysis of the path of perestroika, the main message is a call to adopt a more centralized approach to economic reform while still pursuing political liberalization. Despite its distinctly pro-reform stance, the paper is couched in language which is clearly influenced by the Marxist-Leninist tradition and which is largely unfamiliar to Western-trained
Economics in the Former Soviet Union 141
economists. Consider the following excerpt (Yevstigneyeva and Yevstigneyev, 1990, p. 81):
. . . the revolutionary mass proletarian consciousness is characterized by authoritarianism, hyperideologization, simplification all the way to the primitivization of relations with culture and religious morality, pseudo-rationality based on the primacy of labor relations and their reduction to a universal form of social community. Finally, the ideal of the factory and the ideal of proletarian society inhere in the revolutionary mass prole-tarian consciousness. Historically, initial political and economic post-revolutionary practice was the objectively necessary embodiment of this consciousness . . .
Much of the article is in a similar vein—one far from the heart of mainstream Western economic thought.
Although one piece cannot, of course, speak for the entire field of Soviet political economy, the article we have cited is representative of the overall field in two respects. First, its methodology is historical and descriptive, and com-pletely devoid of mathematics. It uses a conceptual framework that is derived from the "historical materialism" of previous decades of Soviet economics. There is no behavioral modeling, nor any appeal to individual rational eco-nomic behavior, in a setting in which such approaches would be standard among Western economists. Indeed, in a review of over 100 articles in Voprosy
ekonomiki for the year 1988, we found not one single article that employed any
mathematics, nor any article that attempted to set forth a model, behavioral or otherwise, as the basis for its arguments. Second, despite a theoretical orienta-tion, the main purpose of the article is to influence the current policy debate. Writings in the other main tradition of Soviet economics—mathematical economics—can present a stark contrast. Such papers frequently use extremely sophisticated mathematics, without much attention to verbal explanations. Many mathematical economics papers end as soon as the final proof is com-plete. However, Western-style applied analysis utilizing formal behavioral mod-eling is almost entirely absent in Soviet mathematical economics.
A paper on "The Method of Monotone Operators in the Stochastic Theory of Economic Equilibrium" highlights these general features. The object of the paper is to offer a proof of the existence of an equilibrium in a dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium model of an economy with production. The introduction to the paper, prior to the mathematical layout of the model, is quite brief (Yevstigneyev, 1988, p. 21, references omitted): "In this paper, we consider a stochastic dynamic model of the economy, generalizing the deter-ministic models of Gale (see, e.g., [1]) and Polterovich [2]. The main result is an existence theorem of equilibrium trajectories. The proof of the theorem relies on the method of monotone operators [3]."
Following the last Q.E.D. in the body of the paper, the conclusions are equally terse (p. 43, references omitted): "In conclusion, a few comments concerning the literature. Various stochastic dynamic models of economic equilibrium are considered in [8–11]. T h e analysis of the model considered in this paper was begun in [12]. Theorems 1 and 2, together with the basic stages of the proof were published in [13]."
Two other currents in Soviet mathematical economics should be noted, for which the above paper is not representative. T h e first involves forecasting with the use of non-behavioral models, such as those employing long (Kondratiev) waves. These papers are similar to papers reported in the Western journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Indeed, this journal, unknown to most Western economists, is popular among Soviet economists working in forecasting.
A second stream of mathematical economics, and one that until quite recently was of great importance in the Soviet Union, is the "System of Optimal Functioning of the Socialist Economy," or SOFE, initially developed at the Central Mathematical Economics Institute (TsEMI) in Moscow.7 T h e SOFE
tradition presents a unifying concept for the mathematical economics approach to optimal planning, by viewing the economy as a linked hierarchical system with an economy-wide objective function. Its hallmarks include optimization models of production, efficiency concerns, information flows among subsys-tems, and shadow price calculations. Traditionally, the system-wide objective function has been assumed to be determined by the highest level of the hierarchy, the central planners. Shadow prices generated within the optimiza-tion models of SOFE provided a guide toward economic reform proposals, but the system-wide objective function limited the scope of these proposals to the framework of a centrally planned economy.
Historical Background
The competition between political economists and mathematical economists explains much of the current state of economics in the Soviet Union. This rivalry is worth tracing in greater detail.
Between the 1930s and late 1950s, all Soviet economics was political economy. (Even today, the term "economist" is generally reserved for political economists, while mathematical economists require the adjective "mathemati-cal" to differentiate themselves.) Soviet political economists were primarily engaged in extending Marxist economic analysis through the creation of a "political economy of socialism," as well as by continuing critiques of modern
Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy and Jim Leitzel 143
capitalism. Their efforts centered on such areas of inquiry as identification of the objective economic laws of socialist development and the relationships between value and socialist pricing.
T h e rival school of mathematical economics was not publicly founded until 1960, but it quickly came into its own in the work of such figures as L. V. Kantorovich, V. S. Nemchinov, and V. V. Novozhilov. This founding trio was jointly awarded a Lenin Prize in 1965, and Kantorovich shared (with Tjalling
Koopmans) the Nobel Prize in economics in 1975.
Mathematical economics posed a threat to the hegemony of political economy, making confrontation between the two subdisciplines almost in-evitable. T h e conflict has persisted until the present. The attitude of many political economists is typified by recent remarks by Yu. V. Orfeyev, who described mathematical economics as "a futile line of inquiry, which is leading economic thought into a blind alley," an outcome which could only be avoided, he argued, by "consciously applying principles of dialectical logic when analyz-ing plannanalyz-ing and management decisions" (Roundtable, Fall 1988, pp. 65–66). More generally, political economists attacked their mathematical rivals on two grounds. First, they alleged that the mathematical approach was actually a smokescreen for the introduction of bourgeois economics and was therefore ideologically unacceptable to dogmatic Marxists. Second, they charged that mathematical economics was inapplicable to practical problems of the economy. T h e ideological hostility to mathematical economics had various roots. Marx's economic writings were largely non-mathematical, while by the 1960s Western economics was profoundly mathematical. Just as the use of a secret code suggests that a message is sensitive, the very use of mathematics was thought to suggest that the content was inappropriate for usual verbal communication.
But in addition, mathematical economics did threaten some Marxist think-ing. T h e shadow prices that were calculated in the solution to optimization problems were often not strictly in accord with one of the fundamental tenets of Marxism: the labor theory of value. Inputs that involved little direct or embod-ied labor might have positive shadow prices. Neoclassical ideas about marginal valuations and pricing go hand-in-glove with mathematical optimization techniques.
Historically, the main defense of Soviet mathematical economists to charges of ideological deviation was that mathematical optimization techniques them-selves were value-free. T h e choice of the objective function was where ideology matters, they argued, and in this they offered the reassurance that they were still guided by socialist principles. Novozhilov (1972, quoted in Kazakevich, 1987, p. 8), for instance, asserted: "It is not Lagrange multipliers that are incompatible with Marxism, but the economic content of those bourgeois theories which make wide use of these multipliers. . . .Methods using Lagrange-Kantorovich multipliers can be applied to any content." An addi-tional defense was to point out that their critics were motivated by their own
inability to comprehend mathematics (for example, Roundtable, Fall 1988, p. 81).
The second attack on mathematical economics—namely, that there was no practical relevance to these highly theoretical undertakings—parallels a com-mon charge against academic economics in the West. But since economists in the Soviet Union were expected to be practical, this criticism was perhaps more powerful in the East. The state maintained economists in order to improve the performance of industries. If their models were not relevant, then their raison d'etre was being challenged.
The evidence for the charge that Soviet mathematical economics was impractical was that, on the whole, the planning mechanism operated indepen-dently of the mathematical models. Even relatively well-known mathematical tools such as input-output analysis played only a secondary role in planning. Within enterprises, the organization of production was largely immune to the influences of economic models.
To answer the charge that their work was of no practical significance, mathematical economists adopted at least four lines of defense. First, they frequently cited their success in rationalizing (to some degree) the pricing of natural resources. Since natural resources exist independently of human labor, a strict labor theory of value suggests that they should be virtually free goods. Adherence to this principle resulted in huge economic waste in the USSR. Kantorovich's demonstration that such natural resources command positive shadow prices led the Soviet government to raise prices on natural resources. A second defense was that while mathematical economists were willing to (and in fact did) produce practical models, their consumers were not really interested in such output. Industries were not motivated to employ models that reduced costs, since their rewards were cost-based. "To the contrary, optimiza-tion, cost reducoptimiza-tion, and economy of resources are 'harmful' to them" (Mayminas in Roundtable, Fall 1988, p. 79).
A third defense to charges of impracticality was that whatever the short-comings of the models might have been, they were due to faulty (and even purposely faulty) premises and poor official data—"garbage in, garbage out." In fact, argued the mathematical economists, one main impediment to the relevance of their work was that they had to adhere to the "laws" of the political economists. Phenomena of the real economic system that did not match the official ideology (like involuntary unemployment) could not be openly ex-plored, at least until recently.
The final tack taken by defenders of mathematical economics was to note that their field, even while hampered by the factors listed above, still was no less practical than the alternative, namely political economy. And here the defense was irrefutable: even Soviet officials have repeatedly criticized political economy for its uselessness and unscientific approach (Åslund, 1987). In the end, just as excessive state control of markets for goods and services resulted in perverse
Economics in the Former Soviet Union 145
incentives in the Soviet economy, state control of economic sciences led to a form of economics that was largely dissociated from Soviet reality.
Reform and Soviet Economics
Most Soviet political economists feel embattled these days, as the ideologi-cal underpinnings of their discipline are discarded by a society that has abandoned communism. They are also regarded as second-class citizens by many mathematical economists, who see little value in their descriptive ap-proach. Some political economists are looking for shelter elsewhere. One political economist explained to us that he was escaping by taking the increas-ingly popular route of economics and sociology, while others reported that they had no choice but to go back and "learn economics."
But mathematical economists, too, are in disarray, since the crumbling of the planning mechanism has undermined their investment into mathematical models of optimal planning. Some mathematical economists are turning to nonmathematical methods to examine economic reform. They may eventually return to mathematical models of market economies once the Soviet Union's successor states have instituted free markets on a wide scale; as one former mathematical economist put it, "Mathematics is our past, and is our future." But during the current reform period, at least, mathematical approaches appear to be less prevalent.
Despite the low esteem in which economists are generally held by the Soviet public (Aganbegyan, 1989), reform has not been altogether negative for Soviet economists. As mentioned, a few individuals have been appointed to top policy-making positions. For research-oriented economists, more data has be-come available, and the possibilities for exchanges with Western scholars have expanded enormously. Furthermore, many economists in all categories have benefited materially from the new tolerance for private economic activity, by doing off-hours consulting work for enterprises, state agencies, and even joint ventures.
But while political economists have significant institutional knowledge, and mathematical economists have outstanding quantitative skills, neither variety of Soviet economist has the mindset of a typical economist from a market-oriented country. Almost all Soviet economists that we talked with agreed that Soviet economists in general do not understand even the basic principles of the workings of markets.
George Stigler has noted that the respect one has for markets tends to increase with the time spent studying markets. Soviet economists have not spent years studying markets, nor has their prior training tended to instill respect for markets. Rather, they have been trained to regard the "anarchy" of the market as a substantial defect of capitalism. This tradition has been
reflected in the numerous reform proposals calling for "regulated markets" as a means of avoiding the chaos of free markets. This background is bound to limit thinking about the options for economic reform.
With respect to the transition period, however, Soviet economists may not be at such a large disadvantage relative to Western economists. Much of the current Western economics literature concerning Soviet reform is not techni-cally sophisticated, but rather consists of the application of basic economic principles to the conditions of Soviet economic reform. This relative simplicity should make it easier for Soviet-trained economists to assimilate such Western literature and quickly be in a position to argue the merits and flaws of various reform proposals in a language shared with their Western counterparts.
An encouraging example of how Soviet economists have been able to apply basic economic principles to a reform issue is a recent paper on enterprise taxation after reform. "Tax Schedules: Functions, Properties, and Control Methods," by Alekshchenko et al., appeared in the TsEMI journal Ekonomika i matematicheskiye metody [Economics and Mathematical Methods] in 1989. T h e paper examines various methods of enterprise taxation, including the extremes of leaving enterprises a fixed amount of profit and charging a lump-sum tax. T h e incentive effects of the various taxes are discussed (although no behavioral model producing these incentives is provided). Since the Soviet Union tradi-tionally relied on financial requisitioning instead of Western-style enterprise taxation, even the rudiments of a tax system were not well-known in the Soviet Union. Consequently, the authors provide a guide to the functions of a tax system, discuss different tax bases, and make their own proposals for the best system to adopt. The references in the paper are also noteworthy: one refer-ence to a current Soviet paper, two to works by Soviet economists of the 1920s, and one to a western "Principles of Economics" text.
The Future of Economics Education
Current economics educators, like other Soviet economists, are for the most part trained in areas that will have little relevance outside of a planned economy. Future economists in the various successor states to the USSR will certainly not need a thorough grounding in the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or in the techniques of optimal planning on which today's economics professors spent countless classroom hours. Indeed, a huge percent-age of the specific " h u m a n capital" of educators has been rendered worthless by the decision to move to a market economy. Where will the new educators come from, and what will they teach? What might a reformed economics profession look like in a reformed economy?
One possibility—for the economics discipline as for the economy in general —is the wholesale adoption of the mainstream Western alternative. Though
Michael Alexeev, Clifford Gaddy and Jim Leitzel 147
simple in concept, this transition will not be easy, and it will surely not dispel all controversy surrounding the field of economics. Suffice it to mention that many of the very criticisms which have been levelled at the old Soviet economics— excessive use of jargon and mathematics, and irrelevance to economic reality—are similar to those made of economics education in the West (Krueger et al., 1991; Hansen, 1991). An alternate possibility would be to search for a "third way" between Soviet political economy and Western neoclassical economics.
There are signs that leading educators of the former Soviet Union do recognize the need to change the nature of the economics profession, but that they are still undecided on the path. Recent remarks by A. R. Markov (1990), assistant dean of the school of economics of Moscow State University, illustrate this indecisiveness.
Today we are discussing what the subject of our future political economy should be. One point of view says that it should be based on micro- and macroeconomic analysis as traditionally taught in Western universities. A second proposal is that students should study general economic theory, although less ideologized, which would investigate the universal economic laws that exist in any society and any industrialized system. These include the laws of reproduction, balance of economic systems, existence of mone-tary systems, and financial relations. There are also those who advocate the introduction of a new science, which might be called the theory of economic activity and which would study the mechanism and the philoso-phy of economic activity in the broadest sense.
Markov's first approach, then, is to adopt Western models. The other two alternatives sound suspiciously like a minor repackaging of the political econ-omy of socialism. While reasonable people can differ over exactly what eco-nomics curriculum should be established in the former Soviet Union, surely it should be a significant departure from either the political or mathematical approaches of the past.
• The authors would like to thank Richard Ericson, Alan Gelb, Gordon Tullock, Charles Kolstad, Ildar Karimov, Yevgeniy Kuznetsov, I. Z. Mayminas, Joseph Stiglitz, and Timothy Taylor for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to the many Soviet-trained economists who described their professional experiences.
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