On the Reformability of the Soviet-type Economic Systems

There is now a general agreement that the Soviet-type economic system (STES) displays great resistance to change: most of its attempted reforms have been rejected and practically none of them has produced — while it lasted — a radical increase in overall economic efficiency. One way of conceptualising the reasons for these failures is to say that the reforms did not reach a required ‘critical mass’ or — in other words — that they did not pass a necessary ‘threshold’. This conveys the idea that one cannot depart from the STES by accumulating successive partial changes. For while the next such changes are envisaged, the previous ones remain ineffective or are simply discarded outright. Thus the main problem is that the reform of the STES is largely indivisible.