An Estimate of National Income of Czechoslovakia, 1946-1953

Abstract

DURING the past few decades the national income accounts have been used increasingly as a tool for the analysis of the structure and growth of the national economy. In most Western countries these accounts are prepared either officially or semi-officially; for the countries of the Soviet bloc there are some official data of questionable value and many careful studies by Western scholars dealing with the U.S.S.R. There is, so far as I have been able to discover, nothing in this field which deals with other countries belonging to this Soviet bloc of nations, despite the fact that their economic potential is far from negfliible, and their economic development perhaps more interesting than that of the U.S.S.R. At the beginning of Soviet rule, Russia was an economically underdeveloped, if not an undeveloped, semi-feudal country, with characteristics which made it unsuitable for a communistic experiment. As a result, the evaluation of the subsequent performance of Soviet economy has led to a bi-polarization of views. On the one hand is found the view that economic organizations of the same type are bound to suffer from the same ills, regardless of whether they are run by Frenchmen, Russians, or Americans, and that therefore there is nothing atypical in the Russian performance. On the other hand, there is the belief that it is a disaster for the idea of planning that Russia should have been the country where it was first tried out. Czechoslovakia., in contrast, was at the time of transition an advanced industrial nation. To measure the economic growth of this nation after the imposition of the Soviet-type planning appears to be an interesting undertaking. I have undertaken this task while working on a somewhat different problem.' A highly digested description of the techniques I used to arrive at the national income estimates covers well over one hundred pages. I fear that such a manuscript would strain the patience of most readers. For that reason I ' intend to acquaint the reader with only the bare results of my work. The