Learning to Show and Tell Capitalist Style

Abstract

Mirrors of the Economy: National Accounts and International Norms in Russia and Beyond. By Yoshiko M. Herrera Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 252 pp., $49.95 hardcover (ISBN 978-08014-4585-9). The collapse of the Soviet Union also saw the end of the particularly Soviet method of national economic accounting. The USSR did not account for its national economic development through the system of national accounts (SNA), the procedure for generating statistical pictures of national economic wealth and development standard in advanced liberal capitalist economies that we take for granted as the means of measuring economic activity. The USSR used the material product system (MPS) and its satellite states followed suit. MPS covered a different range of economic activity to SNA, divided the economy up into different sectors, and had a different headline statistics: where SNA calculates gross domestic product and its components, MPS was concerned with “net material product,” roughly the volume of what was produced, and the balances between economic sectors. The differences between the two systems of national accounting meant that moving from MPS to SNA after the end of communism was a major change both in how statistics were gathered, the use that they could be put to, and the operation and political importance of Goskomstat, the state statistical agency. Such deep-seated and far-reaching change is …