Economic reform in the U.S.S.R.

Extract

The comprehensive and allround economic reform currently under way in the Soviet Union embraces all the sectors of the national economy - industry, construction, farming, transport, trade, science, etc.: it extends to all levels in the organizational structure of the management of social production - work-shops, enterprises, associations, industrial chief administrations, and ministries. The reform is bringing many changes to the traditional forms and methods of activity of the central planning, economic and financial-credit agencies of the state.

The socialist enterprises have been now endowed with wide rights in managing the economic resourses, regulating their interrelations with the raw material suppliers and the consumers of the finished products. In this connection, the question sometimes is voiced in the foreign press: is not the economic reform currently under way in the Soviet Union a renouncement of the basic principles of socialist production management, does it not herald a weakness of the planned nature of the Soviet economy?