Why Did Socialism Fail? The Role of Factor Inputs Reconsidered

Tamás Vonyó () and Alexander Klein
Additional contact information
Alexander Klein: University of Kent

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: We present revised growth accounts for three socialist economies between 1950 and 1989. Government statistics reported distorted measures for both the rate and trajectory of productivity growth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Researchers have benefited from revised output data, but continued to use official statistics on capital input, or estimated capital stock from official investment data. Investment levels and rates of capital accumulations were, in fact, much lower than officially claimed and over-reporting worsened over time. Sluggish factor accumulation, specifically declining equipment investment and labor input, contributed much more to the socialist growth failure of the 1980s than previously thought.

Keywords: growth accounting; capital accumulation; Socialism; Eastern Europe JEL Classification: N14; N64; O47; P27 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... s/276-2016_klein.pdf

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:cge:wacage:276

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().