AHC/WI: Prevent Post-USSR Russia's Economic Crisis

I still don't see what this has to do with the question the OP posed.



You were implying that the Russians could not change and could not do better in the 90s - since politics, culture and historical factors are all fluid over time, I was wondering what was left.



Certainly part of what is going on. Also, industrial production is becoming more evenly spread across the world.



Right. But again, actual dictating of prices is incidental to the point I am making - that the Union was moving resources around the SSRs in a way that benefited everyone in the short/medium term.

Coordination is a good thing in economies and I reckon the SSRs of the FSU would have transitioned better if they'd coordinated better. So, for example, if Russian tourists had still been able to conveniently access Georgian tourist resorts and Georgian wine had been able to conveniently access the Russian market the Georgian economy wouldn't have imploded as badly. If there'd been a loose federation and "federal restructuring funds" of some kind, then perhaps more Kazakh industry would have survived the transition. If Russia had been able to freely trade with the other SSRs (or former SSRs), then it wouldn't have needed to spend so much money building new infrastructure and facilities in Russia to meet demands that could have been met by old Soviet infrastructure/facilities.



And yet Americans seem to find a way to argue about this... It is frightening to me how many people I meet who want their state to become an independent country. But yes, you are right that Americans have more family-feeling for each other than Germans do for Greeks. This wasn't true when the US first made itself a fiscal and monetary union though.

fasquardon


Raw materials are both less valuable and more volatile in price. Russia is exporting crude oil, not plastic.

Better than they did? Possibly Better by much? Probably not. Revolutionary changes have short term negative effects that can't be overcome. Russians aren't subhuman but they are also not superhuman.

Which didn't spread to Russia. Does anyone outside of Russia and Third World backwaters buy a lot of Russian goods?

Dictating of prices is very important. It usually means the person being dictated to is getting screwed over which causes resentment. Even if they are not they strongly suspect it. It causes market distortions resulting in shoddy goods, shortages and a thriving black market which are all thing the USSR was well known for.

Possibly, but it probably near impossible to prevent. The Balts and the Georgians among others want to have nothing to do with the Russians.

For all that there was no significant secession movement after the ACW and no significant one now. Americans share the same history, the same language, the same culture, and the same law. The same can not be said of Germany and Greece or France and Spain or Italy and the Netherlands.
 

RousseauX

Donor
You need to hang out with more developmental economists.

Value added manufacturing output is one of the best measures for industry, but depend too much on it and you will miss things. Things that you might spot by looking at overall employment or indicator industries like construction and steel.
Can you indicate what kind of things are being "missed" and why they indicate deindustrialization?


Have you actually read the hard data on the Soviet economy in the period or any of the in-depth analyses of said data that have been produced over the last 20 years? (And, given that this is the SU we are speaking of, which data have you read?)

Certainly you speak like you're working from a very narrow information base here.
Yes I have actually
 
Can you indicate what kind of things are being "missed" and why they indicate deindustrialization?

For example:

*Value-added statistics don't tell you about how artisanal an economy is becoming
*They don't tell you about production volumes
*They don't tell you about number of product classes being produced in an economy (though almost always economies where workers achieve high value-added outputs, the complexity of the overall economy is very high)
*They don't tell you about number of people employed in the manufacturing workforce
*They don't tell you about the number of industrial facilities in an economy
*They don't tell you how evenly industrial activity is spread geographically
*They don't tell you about how accounting practices may have changed over the reporting period the base data was drawn from
*They don't tell you about inflation in the economy and (for inflation-adjusted stats) how the inflation-adjusting was done.

None of those pieces of information is going to tell you more on its own than real value-added per worker does, but the more complete the set of data you have, the clearer what is going on in the real economy will be.

So the other indicators do not so much indicate deindustrialization on their own as give you more tools to spot a deindustrialization if it is happening. Just like the value-added indicator is a tool for spotting what is happening.

Also, "deindustrialization" is hardly a precise term. I think most people think of deindustrialization as being some combination of falling volume of goods produced and number of people employed in manufacturing.

It isn't something I 100% agree with myself. I do recognize that there is something which we might call "social deindustrialization" though, where goods produced/value of goods produced stays flat or even rises, but the industrial workforce shrinks, leading it to become less important culturally.

Yes I have actually

So what books/papers do you think give the best picture of the Soviet economy from the late 70s through to the collapse? And what books/papers have you read that you think give a misleading picture of the Soviet economy?

fasquardon
 
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