Book Description

Scholars have studied the Soviet economy for decades to better understand its operation, performance and development. These efforts have concentrated on many aspects of the economy such as: the growth of gross national product and national income and their distribution among main branches of the economy; output levels planned and achieved by various industries; the development and changes within individual industries; and the development strategy for the national economy and the resulting investment priorities. Few studies, however, have provided a detailed analysis of interactions among industries and how these interactions have changed over time. Input-output analysis is a methodology which was developed to analyze the interactions among industries. While input-output analysis has been used extensively to study the economy of individual countries, to compare economies of different countries, and to study changes in an economy over time, it has been used rather sparingly to gain additional information concerning the Soviet economy. This thesis uses reconstructed versions of the Soviet input-output tables for 1959, 1966, 1972, and 1977 and an assortment of methods based on the input-output model to study changes in the level of complexity and structures of the Soviet economy.