Eastern Bloc command economies were able to achieve rapid economic growth initially because they still had a large percentage of the workforce underemployed in agriculture, much of which could be directed into more productive industrial employment. Additionally, the USSR, in particular, had under-exploited natural resources where exploitation rates could be increased. For a while, therefore, they were able to outgrow the capitalist economies for which both of the above advantages had expired decades earlier. This was the period that suggested the model could work.
However, once the playing field levelled out and both economic models could only grow through efficiency improvement and investment, the command economies fell behind because there was no competition to stimulate innovation. (You don’t have to build a better car than the Trabant if the Trabant is the only car that the masses are allowed to buy.)
The command economies also wasted up to ten percent of the labour force taking the place of market forces to plan what the remaining ninety percent should do, and created perverse incentives to meet set targets rather than operate efficiently.
This coincided with improved communications so that an international demonstration effect alerted Eastern consumers to the fact that lifestyles were better in the capitalist countries. Essentially the USSR’s empire collapsed because it couldn’t compete in the arms race and the consumer products race at the same time.
Putin’s revanchist regime has courted popularity through encouraging nostalgia for the lost empire but is now running up against the same constraints, which is why he’s having to raise the pension age despite the resulting unpopularity.
Of course, certain UK politicians’ ideas are rooted so firmly in the past they seem not to have noticed Russia is no longer the USSR and no longer even makes a pretence of putting the workers’ interests first.
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