Trends in Soviet imports of western technology

Abstract

.It has been argued that in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the Soviet leadership embarked on a policy of greater economic contact with the developed capitalist countries which involved, in particular, an increased role in Soviet economic plans for imports of technologically advanced western machinery. For example, Hardt (1976), Hardt and Holliday (1977), Wiles (1976) and Green and Levine (1976 and 1978) have all expressed this view. Wiles and Green and Levine have linked this change in Soviet policy with the Soviet-American detente of the late 1960s. Wiles, for instance, writes that From the Soviet viewpoint, detente has one motive above all others: the acquisition of more advanced techniques from the richer capitalist countries. For new privileges in this field, the USSR has been willing to pay in advance by minor political concessions of a kind likely to appeal to their electorates, but it has not and will not pay in any other coin. (Wiles, 1976, p. 23) The existence of an abrupt change in Soviet policy is supported by Wiles by direct reference to the manifest perceptions of Soviet leaders of the role that western technology could play in raising the performance of the Soviet economy. Of the writers mentioned above, only Green and Levine have attempted to discover in a systematic way whether such policy changes that may have occurred are reflected in a change in an appropriate empirical indicator of Soviet acquisition of western technology. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the existence of such a discontinuity in the trend of Soviet acquisition of western technology as represented by imports of machinery. The more general question of whether the perceptions and intentions of the Soviet leadership changed in an abrupt way is regarded as a separate issue and is a subsidiary concern in what follows. Whether the elevation of the importance of western technology as an input in the Soviet economy has been a gradual process, or whether a break has occurred at some point, and if the latter at what point that break occurred, are questions which are of interest for at least two reasons. First, as Hanson has pointed out: The precise date of the policy shift is not in itself important now, but our reading of the way trade policy works is important. What decisions go to Politburo level? Which commercial policy decisions are seen as purely technical, and which are seen as requiring foreign policy decisions as well? (Hanson, 1976, p. 793)