Problems of the Planned Economy

Problems of the Planned Economy

Author: John Eatwell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1990-07-23

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1349208639

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This is an excerpt from the 4-volume dictionary of economics, a reference book which aims to define the subject of economics today. 1300 subject entries in the complete work cover the broad themes of economic theory. This extract concentrates on problems encountered in a planned economy.


Markets and Power

Markets and Power

Author: Eric A. Schutz

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

Published: 2001-03-28

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780765640642

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In what ways do the actions and economic behavior of today's multinational corporations resemble the functioning and processes of the old command economics of the Soviet Union? By ignoring questions about power relations in markets, mainstream neoclassically-oriented economists conclude that there are no significant power structures operating in market systems to control allocation and distribution. This book argues to the contrary that there are fundamental and systemic power structures - monopoly, access to information or finance, employer power, etc. - at work in market economies, which affects their ability to achieve real "competition" in much the same way as state-controlled, command economies hinder business activities. Thus, for example, the biggest firms at the hubs of financial "networks" wield a kind of "shaping power" upon large numbers of relatively autonomous firms, not only upon those that belong to the networks but also on the many firms outside them that are also affected.


The Regulated Economy

The Regulated Economy

Author: Claudia Goldin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0226301346

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How has the United States government grown? What political and economic factors have given rise to its regulation of the economy? These eight case studies explore the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origins of government intervention in the United States economy, focusing on the political influence of special interest groups in the development of economic regulation. The Regulated Economy examines how constituent groups emerged and demanded government action to solve perceived economic problems, such as exorbitant railroad and utility rates, bank failure, falling agricultural prices, the immigration of low-skilled workers, workplace injury, and the financing of government. The contributors look at how preexisting policies, institutions, and market structures shaped regulatory activity; the origins of regulatory movements at the state and local levels; the effects of consensus-building on the timing and content of legislation; and how well government policies reflect constituency interests. A wide-ranging historical view of the way interest group demands and political bargaining have influenced the growth of economic regulation in the United States, this book is important reading for economists, political scientists, and public policy experts.


Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

Author: Amy C. Offner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0691205205

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The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destruction In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country’s housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.


Political Control of the Economy

Political Control of the Economy

Author: Edward R. Tufte

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780691021805

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Speculations about the effects of politics on economic life have a long and vital tradition, but few efforts have been made to determine the precise relationship between them. Edward Tufte, a political scientist who covered the 1976 Presidential election for Newsweek, seeks to do just that. His sharp analyses and astute observations lead to an eye-opening view of the impact of political life on the national economy of America and other capitalist democracies. The analysis demonstrates how politicians, political parties, and voters decide who gets what, when, and how in the economic arena. A nation's politics, it is argued, shape the most important aspects of economic life--inflation, unemployment, income redistribution, the growth of government, and the extent of central economic control. Both statistical data and case studies (based on interviews and Presidential documents) are brought to bear on four topics. They are: 1) the political manipulation of the economy in election years, 2) the new international electoral-economic cycle, 3) the decisive role of political leaders and parties in shaping macroeconomic outcomes, and 4) the response of the electorate to changing economic conditions. Finally, the book clarifies a central question in political economy: How can national economic policy be conducted in both a democratic and a competent fashion?


Controlling Credit

Controlling Credit

Author: Eric Monnet

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1108415016

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Monnet analyzes monetary and central bank policy during the mid-twentieth century through close examination of the Banque de France.


The People's Republic of Walmart

The People's Republic of Walmart

Author: Leigh Phillips

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 178663516X

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Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.


The Logic of the Planned Economy

The Logic of the Planned Economy

Author: Pawel H. Dembinski

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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This timely book examines and seeks to explain the inner contradictions of centrally planned economies and shows how the seeds of their collapse had existed within the system from the very start. The author shows how the orthodox ideological principles of the system rendered it inflexible and incapable of reform and thus unable to transform itself into an efficient modern economy. Though the system as such has ceased to exist, it is as yet only the rules that have disappeared--the system's components continue to exist and, the author argues, a proper understanding of the origins and previous functions of each component is necessary if it is to be integrated into the new system.