Restructuring the Soviet Economy addresses the fundamental economic problem facing the Soviet government at the present time. How can an economy which has been centrally planned for 60 years make the testing and painful transition to market-based principles? The Soviet experience in the latter half of the 1980s suggests that it is going to be a much more difficult task than was initially believed in either East or West.

In this collection of essays David A Dyker explores some of the most difficult and fascinating aspects of the process of transition from autocratic “real socialism” to a capitalism that is sometimes democratic, sometimes authoritarian. The stress is on the economic dimension of transformation, but the author sets the economic drama firmly within a political economy framework and a historical perspective. Trends in key economic variables are analysed against the background of the struggle between different social and political groups for power and command over resources. While...

A product of the Framework V research project, this book addresses one of the key problems facing the EU today: Why is the ‘new’ EU so much poorer than the ‘old’, and how will EU enlargement help to solve the problem? Focusing on the productivity problems underlying the East-West gap, it looks in particular at the role that foreign investment and R&D can play in closing it. Against that background, the book assesses what role proactive development policy might play in attacking the roots of low social productivity. Concluding that there will be a clear-cut process...

This book uses a range of S&T and structural indicators to analyse the transfonnation process, in particular the transfonnation of science, technology and industry, in the fonner communist countries. The book originates from a sense of the tremendous need for quantitative indicators for assessing trends and perfonnance in the post-socialist economies. S&T systems in the region have passed through the first phase of rapid deterioration, or as it is called by some analysts 'implosion'. After ten years of transfonnation we are witnessing a process of increasing differentiation of these countries...

This important book focuses on post-Lisbon Agenda issues of alignment and misalignment on different dimensions of European society and the European economy, including industrial systems, R&D systems, educational systems and job markets. It also looks in particular at the peripheral regions of Europe — the less developed parts of ‘old’ Europe, the parts of old Europe that are outside or only half-inside the EU, the new member-states of the EU, and Turkey as the most important EU candidate country. It takes as its methodological starting point the theory of network...

This 1983 book presents a comprehensive account of the cycle of fixed capital investment in the Soviet Union, from strategic decision-taking in the Kremlin down to the level of individual building sites. Dr Dyker places the subject in the context of welfare economics and decision-taking theory, but the book's emphasis is on the detailed empirical analysis of Soviet material. It includes analysis of the Soviet design and construction sectors and the developments in Soviet procedures for assessing investment effectiveness, as well as a unique series of case studies of individual investment...

Seeks to answer the crucial question of how countries which have suffered in productivity levels, and a complete loss of innovatory momentum, over a period of 20-30 years can rediscover their dynamism? A dynamic challenge to the prevailing belief of the standard shock therapy' literature that believes that balanced budgets and stable prices are sufficient to cure the ills of economically stagnant societies.

On its publication in 1985, this book offered a fresh analysis of the problems faced by the Soviet economy by focussing on the key issues in the economic planning system. David Dyker considers the available options for reform during the 1980s and the most likely developments. Discussing the origins of the Soviet economic planning system and the theories which founded it, previous attempts to reform the organisational structure and the particular problem of agriculture, Dyker presents a picture of an increasingly bleak future for the Soviet economy. This is a comprehensive title written by a...

This volume is part of the multivolume set on Globalisation in Eurasia and the Pacific Rim. It depicts the key region of the world, "Eurasia and the Pacific Rim," which contains four of the biggest emerging economies, a large number of highly dynamic small- and medium-sized emerging economies, and one of the leading advanced industrial countries. It is also the region that has some of the biggest hydrocarbon and mineral deposits in the world, and some of the most energy- and metal-hungry economies in the world. With half the world's population, it is considered one of the most dynamic regions...