How did Soviet Union growth-rate compare with capitalist countries?

[Blanquist]

I think the Soviet Union had a really incredible growth rate, 1929-1939

But how does that growth rate compare with post-war Japan and post-Mao China?

Where can I get quality Soviet economic data in a easily read and understood form?

I want to know which country they did most of their trade with, by year. Oil exports as % of revenue, etc, etc.

Thank you.

[The Young Pioneer]

When I opened this I was thinking you meant population.

Halfway through your question you're asking about the economy.

At the end you're talking about exports which didn't really count for much of the USSR's GNP.

So...could you reword the question? :confused:

[Revolutionair]

Remember that objectivity in this field is almost possible. Economics is widely subject to interpretation.

I advice you to look at the growth of production capacity. How many new factories did they create, how many consumer goods did the citizens consume, by how much did consumption grow, etc.

[ridethejetski]

Maurice Dobb or Alec Nove are your best bets i think

[Blanquist]

At the end you're talking about exports which didn't really count for much of the USSR's GNP.


How come some Russian economists talk about the price of oil being the reason for Soviet Unions fall, or at least playing a big part?

[Blanquist]

Remember that objectivity in this field is almost possible. Economics is widely subject to interpretation.

I advice you to look at the growth of production capacity. How many new factories did they create, how many consumer goods did the citizens consume, by how much did consumption grow, etc.

And where could I get this historic data?

[ComradeOm]

One of the problems with measuring Soviet economic growth is what's called the 'Gerschenkron effect', which is the distortion introduced by changing prices into any direct comparison over different periods. It's particularly noted in the case of the USSR

For example, in 1928 machine tools were very expensive in the USSR but this sector grew rapidly, from a small base, over the next decade. So any evaluation of economic growth in 1928 prices is inflated by this sharp growth in an expensive good. I say 'inflated' because as the USSR industrialised the price of machine tools sharply decreased. So if we just the progress of the 1930s using the 1937 prices (in which machine tools are far cheaper) then the rate of growth is much slower

There's no right or wrong answer to this, it's just something to be aware of. It's also why you'll never get one single set of data that is 'the truth' and completely correct

I'll not give the whole series but here are some estimates for the rate of growth in net industrial production from 1928-1940:


Official Soviet: 21.7%
Hodgman (not including armaments): 12.9%
Nutter (not including armaments, 1928 prices): 9.2%
Nutter (including armaments, 1928 prices): 10%
Kaplan-Moorsteen: (not including armaments): 8.4%
Unofficial Soviet estimate (in 1980 prices): 9%
(From Davies, The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union)

So good but not unique. Pretty much on par with any industrialising economy. That said, these figures are somewhat distorted given the boom and bust nature of Soviet industrialisation - the 1930s were years of frantic expansion followed by stagnation and overreach. So some years would have been significantly higher than the average, others decidedly below

Davies has a host of works on Soviet industrialisation and is a minefield of info. The book referenced above is probably the best for sheet tables and the broad overview. Nove is also excellent but I don't have him on hand. Let me know if you need some other figures on the USSR and I'll do what I can

If you still want them, I'll put some tables together on imports/exports over the next day or two. Headlines are: Germany the largest trading partner, exports typically agricultural (thus far down on 1913) and imports machine tools and metals


I advice you to look at the growth of production capacity. How many new factories did they create, how many consumer goods did the citizens consume, by how much did consumption grow, etc.Real production is worth looking at, yes*. Consumption, no. The Stalinist economy was marked by a collapse in civilian consumption as resources were diverted into industry and living standards plunged. Not a good indicator if you're interested in 'pure' economic progress

*But they still don't tell us much. This is because gross output doesn't account for the likes of population change

[JAM]

and living standards plunged.



Are you sure of this? Have you ever red "The standard of living in the Soviet Union, 1928 - 1940" and "Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution" both written by ROBERT C. ALLEN?

I'll just give you a transcript: "By the late 1930's, urban residents and industrial workers, teachers and bureaucrats had economic reasons for supporting the Soviet State".

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Are you sure of this? Have you ever red "The standard of living in the Soviet Union, 1928 - 1940" and "Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution" both written by ROBERT C. ALLEN?

I'll just give you a transcript: "By the late 1930's, urban residents and industrial workers, teachers and bureaucrats had economic reasons for supporting the Soviet State".

At least the first half saw dramatic decline.

[JAM]

At least the first half saw dramatic decline.

I think the improvement was overall and not only in the later half. You have all there in those works that I mentioned.

The author is a very well known expert in economic history. I retrieved this from his article in Wikipedia:
Robert (Bob) C. Allen (born 1947) is Professor of Economic History at Oxford University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University) and a fellow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow) of Nuffield College (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuffield_College,_Oxford). He obtained his BA at Carleton College (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_College) in 1969 and his PhD at Harvard University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University) in 1975. His research interests are economic history, technological change and public policy.
He has been awarded the Ranki Prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ranki_Prize&action=edit&redlink=1) of the Economic History Association (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_History_Association) for his 1992 and 2003 works.

[Alfonso Cano]

So good but not unique. Pretty much on par with any industrialising economy.

Considering the fact that the capitalist world was then engulfed in the Great Depression, achieving no growth at all, that's not "good but not unique", but superb achievement...


Consumption, no. The Stalinist economy was marked by a collapse in civilian consumption as resources were diverted into industry and living standards plunged. Not a good indicator if you're interested in 'pure' economic progress


Are you sure of this? Have you ever red "The standard of living in the Soviet Union, 1928 - 1940" and "Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution" both written by ROBERT C. ALLEN?

I'll just give you a transcript: "By the late 1930's, urban residents and industrial workers, teachers and bureaucrats had economic reasons for supporting the Soviet State".

I will second this. Robert Allen is a great author and his contribution to the field of Soviet economic history has been enormous. I wonder why so many people are willing to accept the portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union as one that destroyed living standards, as ComradeOm suggests, despite the fact that it has be proven long ago that numbers of any kind are highly dubious when it comes to the Soviet Union. Just remember the nonsense about 20 million murdered by Stalin :rolleyes:, while in fact actual number was closer to hundreds of thousands. We should always be sceptical towards such claims and check them before accepting them at face value


I think the improvement was overall and not only in the later half. You have all there in those works that I mentioned.

Actually, there has been a decrease in living standards during the First Five-Year Plan, as has been mentioned by Robert Allen in the book you quote. I have it at my side, so let's check the full meaning of what he wrote. Here is a page from which you have taken your quote:

"The Soviet development model implies that allocating capital to the producer goods sector should lead to higher consumption growth than would otherwise have been possible. Bergson and Chapman called the pertinence of this model into question by propounding the view that consumption per head declined in the 1930's. The history of wages, prices, food production and mortality do not support that pessimism. Consumption did, indeed, languish during the First Five-Year Plan. The explanation has nothing to do with the logic of accumulation-collectivisation was the culprit. Once farm production rebounded from that catastrophe, consumption rose rapidly. By the late 1930's, the production of manufactured consumer goods had increased almost 80 percent.
While this increase is important in understanding the growth of the economy in the 1930's, it also has important implications for the study of politics. The totalitarian model views the state as exclusively oppressive and the population as disaffected and controlled through terror. Historians are questioning this monolithic model. Fitzpatrick (1979) has suggested that the upwardly mobile workers and peasants who formed the new intelligentsia and administrative hierarchy supported Stalinism since they were its beneficiaries. Siegelbaum (1988) has suggested that Stakhanovites also gained from the system and, therefore had a reason to support it. Thurston (1996) has gone furthest in suggesting that Stalinism enjoyed wide support among urban workers. The formation of political attitudes is complex and not immediately reducible to economics, but the standard of living does matter. What we have shown in this chapter is that many people did benefit materially from the economic development of the 1930's. The gainers included the new administrative elite and the Stakhanovites. The millions who migrated to the industrial cities were a much bigger group of beneficiaries. By the late 1930's, urban residents and industrial workers, teachers and bureaucrats had economic reasons for supporting the Soviet state."

So, yes. During one brief period, living standards did fall due to economic disruptions caused by collectivisation. But, contrary to what ComradeOm and older economists like Bergson and Chapman write, living standards did increase significantly during the 30's. Not to mention later. Thus, yet another anti-Communist myth goes to the dustbin of history...

[JAM]

Actually, there has been a decrease in living standards during the First Five-Year Plan, as has been mentioned by Robert Allen in the book you quote. I have it at my side, so let's check the full meaning of what he wrote. Here is a page from which you have taken your quote:

"The Soviet development model implies that allocating capital to the producer goods sector should lead to higher consumption growth than would otherwise have been possible. Bergson and Chapman called the pertinence of this model into question by propounding the view that consumption per head declined in the 1930's. The history of wages, prices, food production and mortality do not support that pessimism. Consumption did, indeed, languish during the First Five-Year Plan. The explanation has nothing to do with the logic of accumulation-collectivisation was the culprit. Once farm production rebounded from that catastrophe, consumption rose rapidly. By the late 1930's, the production of manufactured consumer goods had increased almost 80 percent.
While this increase is important in understanding the growth of the economy in the 1930's, it also has important implications for the study of politics. The totalitarian model views the state as exclusively oppressive and the population as disaffected and controlled through terror. Historians are questioning this monolithic model. Fitzpatrick (1979) has suggested that the upwardly mobile workers and peasants who formed the new intelligentsia and administrative hierarchy supported Stalinism since they were its beneficiaries. Siegelbaum (1988) has suggested that Stakhanovites also gained from the system and, therefore had a reason to support it. Thurston (1996) has gone furthest in suggesting that Stalinism enjoyed wide support among urban workers. The formation of political attitudes is complex and not immediately reducible to economics, but the standard of living does matter. What we have shown in this chapter is that many people did benefit materially from the economic development of the 1930's. The gainers included the new administrative elite and the Stakhanovites. The millions who migrated to the industrial cities were a much bigger group of beneficiaries. By the late 1930's, urban residents and industrial workers, teachers and bureaucrats had economic reasons for supporting the Soviet state."

So, yes. During one brief period, living standards did fall due to economic disruptions caused by collectivisation. But, contrary to what ComradeOm and older economists like Bergson and Chapman write, living standards did increase significantly during the 30's. Not to mention later. Thus, yet another anti-Communist myth goes to the dustbin of history...

Actually, I interpreted "first half" as the whole 30's and not just the period of the first five year plan because Stalin's era is usually divided by the Second World War years.

Thanks for the quotation anyway.

[ComradeOm]

Allen's work is controversial and has been criticised by experts. His assertion that consumption in 1937 was better than 1927* is based on flawed calculations. Wheatcroft, the man who developed some of the initial data series than Allen relied on, believes that the latter failed to apply a correction to pre-Revolution grain production statistics. The result is "an extremely low consumption norm" for 1900-13. When compared to the (corrected) post-revolution figures this considerably skews the figures

See Wheatcroft, Russian and Soviet living standards: Secular growth and conjunctural crises for more info

*This despite the famine of 1936! But then most other evidence tends to contradict Allen's calculation


Considering the fact that the capitalist world was then engulfed in the Great Depression, achieving no growth at all, that's not "good but not unique", but superb achievement...Why are you bothering me with this irrelevancy? Who mentioned the Depression? The question from the OP, and certainly my post, were written in reference to other industrialising nations. Frankly I don't see how the Depression has anything to do with a comparison with, say, "post-war Japan and post-Mao China". Particularly not since the collapse of the international markets had little effect on a economic system almost entirely isolated from said markets...


We should always be sceptical towards such claims and check them before accepting them at face valueAnd draw them from decades of respected scholarship into the question, including validation from archival sources? I can point you to literally dozens of sources that elaborate on the collapse of Soviet living standards in the 1930s. But they won't agree with you so that probably makes them "anti-communist"...

(As an aside, given that you've read Allen's work, what do you make of his conclusion that collectivisation was a mistake?)

I have no problem with Allen and that particular book is worth reading but his calculations are wrong. They are soundly contradicted both by the economic experts (Davies, Wheatcraft, Nove, etc), the more sociologically inclined (Fitzpatrick, Filtzer, S Davies, etc) and the recent crop of archive-driven case-studies (such as Rossman and Murphy). So yeah, I don't care if Allen agrees with your particular fetish, and I'm not willing to write everyone else in the world off as "anti-communist", but his case does not convince

[robbo203]

Why are you bothering me with this irrelevancy? Who mentioned the Depression? The question from the OP, and certainly my post, were written in reference to other industrialising nations. Frankly I don't see how the Depression has anything to do with a comparison with, say, "post-war Japan and post-Mao China". Particularly not since the collapse of the international markets had little effect on a economic system almost entirely isolated from said markets...

Yes and there is also this point to consider - that even without market isolation it does not necessarily follow that because one part of the world capitalist economy is languishing in recession everywhere else must too to a lesser or greater extent. In 2010, for example, Brazil was booming with a recorded growth rate of 7.5 % while others were in the doldrums

Not only that, there is the question of where you are along the trajectory of development. Here's a quote that explains this in the context of the Soviet Union's early rapid and later, not so rapid, growth:



“This decline has entirely confirmed the predictions made in the works of our party twenty years ago when, in order to unmask the lie of the Stalinist thesis which saw in the large growth rates of the time the proof of the pretended «socialism», we showed that this rapid growth characterised all capitalisms in the period of their youth, and its decline is an ineluctable historic law of ageing capitalism. Russian capitalism is no exception. Setting out from a very low level of development aggravated by the devastations of civil war, it was natural for industry to have high rates of growth, which were accelerated still more (as is the case for the majority of newly born capitalisms - see for example Japan) by the strong impetus given by the state in its role as a centraliser of capital. The Stalinist period of accumulation was that of the formation of a real interior market, the transformation from a still predominantly pre-capitalist structure in which the working class formed only a small part of the population (10 % in 1913, as opposed to a peasant population of 76 %), to an entirely capitalist economy, and finally the extensive accumulation that allowed for the creation of an industry responsive to the needs of the interior market. The total number of industrial workers went from 3.9 million in 1913 to 12.2 million in 1950 and more than 27 million in 1975 - up by a factor of seven since the period before the revolution. The number of industrial manufacturing enterprises employing more than 100 workers rose from 2,805 in 1911 (employing 1,645,000 workers) to 11,591 in 1933 (employing 4.5 million workers) and to more than 26,000 in 1968 (employing nearly 19 million workers) (17) - a tenfold increase both in the numbers of enterprises and in the workers employed. These statistics illustrate the budding of a young capitalism, and its blossoming - ceaselessly creating new enterprises, extensively accumulating the absolute surplus-value extorted from the ever increasing army emerging from the land and regimented into industry.
http://www.sinistra.net/lib/upt/comp...ipoebubie.html