Gosplan

CONTROL FIGURES OF THE ECONOMY, 1927/28

METHODOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS

....All the work of drafting the Control Figures was based, as in previous years, on the following categories of methodological techniques: (a) the method of balance estimates, (b) the method of static and dynamic coefficients, (c) expert estimates, and (d) comparison of the recovery elements in the economic development process with the prewar level, and of the reconstruction elements with the individual perspective plans and with the indices for the technological levels of the advanced capitalist countries. It is quite natural that these methodological techniques, which had also been employed in drafting the Control Figures of previous years, should have grown more complicated and been modernized in connection with the objective new situation and the specific tasks of economic policy for the coming year. The method of balances has been used somewhat more consistently in the current year than in past years. But in view of the fact that even this time we were forced to confine ourselves to partial balance estimates in setting up the Control Figures, these estimates were to a certain extent corrected by the construction of a system of static and dynamic coefficients that reveal the interconnection of parts of the economy as a whole, and their evolution in time.

Several remarks should be added to the summary description presented here of the methodological techniques that were employed in drafting the Control Figures. First of all, in studying market phenomena and with respect to the balance of supply and demand it proved possible, in making the 1927/28 projection, to go beyond merely comparing aggregate commodity supplies put on the market with the total disposable income of the urban and rural population combined. The experience of the period gone by has made it abundantly clear Sat a comparison of this kind necessitates operating with such large volumes that even with more dependable statistics than those available to us a “balance discrepancy” of 200 or 300 million can prove to be within the accuracy limits of the computation. More extensive use has been made this year of selective indicators from budget surveys. These indicators enable us to study not only the volume of demand but also the demand structure characteristic of the various groups of the population. At the bidding of Gosplan, the Central Statistical Administration made a special study of the market turnover of nineteen major commodities. Finally, we were able to analyze the balance of market sales for the coming year using two entirely different methods. This enabled us to determine with greater reliability if not the absolute figures, at least the dynamics of the phenomena.

Calculating the effectiveness of capital investments turned out to be the most difficult task. The only method here capable of yielding indices close to reality-the method of expert estimates-proved defective in the extreme for the period in which the 1927/ 28 control figures were being drafted. The problem of checking on the effectiveness of capital investments and of insuring systematic and reliable indices in this sphere has been brought into the sharpest focus by the experience of working on the 1927/28 Control Figures.

Furthermore, there have been and still are exceptional difficulties standing in the way of our studying what happens in the private sector in general and in the differentiation of the countryside in particular. Everyone realizes the inadmissibility and defectiveness of data in which the capitalist and the small-scale producers, whom the socialist sector and its capitalist adversaries are competing to influence, are lumped together under the common designation of private sector. To this day, however, we are obliged to operate with undifferentiated magnitudes and indices of this kind.

Finally,...in the current year we have been able to make a certain amount of progress with respect to quarterly study of the dynamics of economic phenomena and to the feasibility of projecting these phenomena by comparing two years-the economic year (from October through October) and the agricultural (from July through July). This methodological technique is turning out to be very fruitful. One of the most essential tasks in working on the Control Figures hereafter should be to make sure that the dynamics of economic processes are studied and projected by quarters.

It must be re-emphasized that it would be wrong to think that what with the above-mentioned methodological difficulties in the drafting of the 1927/28 Control Figures, there has been no improvement in the caliber of accounting data or of the methodological techniques with which the work was pursued. On the contrary, the years of work on the Control Figures, the extensive and now more firmly established system for observing economic conditions, and, finally, the accumulation of material for the drafting of perspective plans considerably strengthen the foundations of the Control Figures for 1927/28 as compared with their precursors. The growth of the people’s commissariats of the Union and of republic and province planning agencies in turn gives this work more reliable underpinning. The difficulty, however, is that the complexity and responsibility of the work are growing at an extraordinary pace and confronting the country’s planning agencies with more and more new tasks. This dictates special attention to studying the dynamics of the national economy in the past, to perspective planning, and to accumulating and elaborating the methodological techniques of planning in general.

Kontrol’nye tsifry narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1927/28 god. USSR Gosplan. Published by Planovoe khoziaistvo, Moscow, 1928, pp. 4-7.