The growth consequences of socialism

Andreas Bergh, Christian Bjørnskov and Luděk Kouba

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2025, vol. 53, issue 2, 609-626

Abstract: The discussion of the growth consequences of socialism has fulminated for a century, sparked off by the Calculation Debate in the 1920s and 30s, and has concerned the performance of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the mixed development in the 1990s after communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. We aim to inform these debates by providing an empirical assessment of how socialist economies performed across the second half of the 20th century. Using both neighbour comparisons as well as more formal empirical analysis of developing countries that turned socialist after independence, we derive a set of estimates of the degree to which the introduction of a planned socialist economy affects long-run growth and development. Our results robustly point towards a decrease in annual growth rates of approximately two percentage points during the first decade after implementing socialism.

Keywords: Economic growth; Socialism; Institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O43 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596725000289
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:53:y:2025:i:2:p:609-626

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2025.04.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().