IMPROVING RESEARCH ON FORMER SOVIET AND — OTHER HISTORICALLY PLANNED ECONOMIES
I.
BACKGROUND
In the summer of 1990 Representative Lee Hamilton, Chair of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), and Senator Jeff Bingaman, Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Technology and National Security, approached the National Research Council with a request for assistance. They asked the Council to provide an assessment of the relative reliability of the United States government’s estimates of the size and sectoral breakdown of the Soviet economy, to assist the JEC in assessing the value of the methodologies on which these estimates were based, and to identify areas where improvements could be introduced. The Council convened a meeting of specialists in November 1990 under the chairmanship of Lawrence Klein and published a report of the meeting in early 1991.
Subsequent to that meeting and release of the report, the Central Intelligence Agency asked the NRC to undertake a follow-up project focused on improving Western research and understanding of the radical transformations occurring in the Soviet economy. Specifically, the NRC was asked to convene a panel for the purpose of describing a research agenda that could be utilized by the CIA and other institutions supporting research in this field. By the time the NRC convened its Panel on Improving Research on Soviet and Other Transitional Economies in January 1992, events had progressed at such a pace that the object of study, the Soviet economy, had ceased to exist, as had many of the issues slated for investigation. In keeping with the sponsoring agency’s request that the research effort be forward-looking, the focus of the effort shifted to improving the ability of the Western research community to
analyze and understand the economic transition currently underway in the successor states to the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe.
The NRC’s Panel for Improving Research on (formerly) Soviet and Other Historically Planned Economies met on January 14–15, 1992 with the charge to develop a research agenda and specific-guidelines for projects to improve understanding the critical processes taking place in historically planned economies, HPEs, (i.e. formerly centrally planned economies) as they attempt to break away from the administrative-command structures and practices which characterized their pre-reform economies. In consultation with the sponsoring agency, the Panel elected to describe a very broad research framework that could be utilized by public and private institutions interested in sponsoring new research in the field.
Because the transition process in these countries is unlikely to proceed along a straight path from a command economy to one that is characterized by free markets, the panel agreed that research should encompass a variety of possible paths of development and that relatively little investment should be made in efforts to quantify and measure how far any particular economy, region or sector had moved along a path that is presumed to be heading toward a particular kind of market economy. The panel stressed the fact that there are many possibilities for development inherent in the attempt to transform the socio-economic bases of societies that differ on as many dimensions (for example, culture, religion, Westernization, and level of economic development) as those of Scandinavian Estonia, Orthodox Russia and the Islamic republics of Central Asia.
The panel noted the recent expansion of Western assistance to the newly emerging republics as they undergo the transition process. Western governments, private foundations and a variety of international organizations are already providing technical assistance to the successor states, and specialized agencies such as the European Community’s Eurostat and various agencies of the United States government’s statistical system, including the Bureau
