Comparative Economic Studies articles from June 2005

Comparative Economic Studies archives from June 2005

Introduction.(Abram Bergson)
June 1, 2005... Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 239. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100107 In many circles, Abram Bergson is regarded as the 'Father of Comparative Economics.' It is therefore fitting that this collection of essays and testimonials,...

Abram Bergson: the life of a comparativist (1,2).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Assume there was an 'Olympiad of economic systems' with fair rules including a common starting point. Abe Bergson would be the ideal referee of such a tournament, due to his honesty and absolute objectivity. This would have...

Tea leaves and productivity: Bergsonian norms for gauging the Soviet future.(Abram Bergson)
June 1, 2005... Lenin's decision to wrest economic control from the private sector by criminalising business, entrepreneurship, and private ownership was a rash attempt to test the feasibility, and as he supposed the superiority of socialism. Most economists...

Closing the 'Bergson gap': new data on a problem in Soviet statistics (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Over half-a-century ago, the distinguished demographer Frank Lorimer, in his classic study The Population of the Soviet Union (Geneva, 1946), compared the standard Soviet employment series with the equivalent figures in the...

Bergson's structure of Soviet wages.(Abram Bergson)
June 1, 2005... When I learned in 1961 that I would be going to Harvard as a special student associated with the Russian Research Center and working with Abram Bergson I sat down and read his The Structure of Soviet Wages. A Study In Socialist Economics...

The fundamental problem of command: plan and compliance in a partially centralised economy.
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION In The Economics of Planning Abram Bergson (1964, pp. 327-329) distinguished between the economic merit and the rationality of socialism. The merit of socialism was to be gauged by the efficiency with which it satisfied...

A reassessment of the Soviet industrial revolution (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Death requires a post mortem, and the death of a country is no exception. The Soviet Union was a great social experiment with political, social, demographic, and economic dimensions. My research focuses on the economic...

The 'welfare standard' and Soviet consumers.
June 1, 2005... ... granting the predominance of money income and the opportunities to spend it, how nearly real corresponds with money income in the USSR is another matter. In order for household money income to be freely exchanged for consumers" goods at...

Economics of one-party state: promotion incentives and support for the Soviet regime (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Non-democratic regimes die hard. They are swept away by popular revolutions, often followed by years of civil wars, or forcefully removed by foreign powers. The rapid and peaceful demise of the Soviet regime in 1991 is a rare...

Soviet planning archives: the files that Bergson could not see (1).(Abram Bergson)
June 1, 2005... SOVIET PLANNING: A REVIEW OF THE WESTERN LITERATURE Western scholars who studied Soviet planning, or what Abram Bergson called 'industrial materials supply' (Bergson, 1964, chapter 7), had to rely on official Soviet statistical...

Legal contract enforcement in the Soviet economy (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION The literature offers conflicting interpretations of the relationship between the Soviet state arbitration system, Gosarbitrazh, and the modern arbitrazh courts. (2) Some scholars maintain that a wide gap separates the old...

The political economy of Stalinism: a Bergson retrospective.(Abram Bergson)
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Abram Bergson's writings on socialism addressed two themes: the performance of the socialist system, primarily of the Soviet Union, and its working arrangements. The most comprehensive attempt 'to grasp the nature of working...

Forced labour and the need for motivation: wages and bonuses in the Stalinist camp system.
June 1, 2005... Abram Bergson's first monograph was his 1944 study of the Soviet labour market, in which he began his exploration of what was then the terra incognita of the Soviet planned economy (Bergson, 1944). His overall conclusions probably surprised the...

Before Stalinism: the defence industry of Soviet Russia in the 1920s (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Abram Bergson and his colleagues put much effort into estimating the size of the Soviet defence sector. Bergson himself dealt with defence on the basis of officially published budgetary allocations and also by drawing on the...

Corruption in the Gulag: dilemmas of officials and prisoners.
June 1, 2005... PARAMETERS OF THE STUDY In this article, we review the phenomenon of corruption among Gulag officials, defined here as economic or official crime with the goal of enriching oneself at the state's expense. The study further examines...

Trading effort for freedom: workday credits in the stalinist camp system (1).
June 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION: THE LABOUR ECONOMICS OF THE STALINIST CAMP SYSTEM--OPEN QUESTIONS AND POSSIBLE APPROACHES (2) Hard physical labour was the distinguishing feature of Soviet 'corrective labour camps' and 'colonies' (Applebaum, 2003, p. 217),...

Testimonials.(Abram Bergson)(Biography)
June 1, 2005... Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 492-502. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100105 It is the tradition at Harvard, when a faculty member dies, to hold a formal memorial service in Harvard's Memorial Church as well as a subsequent dinner at...