Economic policies compared / edited by

We wished to develop a theory of economie polley which was applicable

East to both present day capitalist and socialist developed economies. Western and eastern à economic systems have now co-existed for fifty years; neither seems on the verge of collapsing. The moment has come for economists of both sides to attempt a dispassionate examination of their economic policies. This requires, amongst other things, that the terminologies used in the and in the West should be rigorously defined and should then be explained in terms of each other. There is still a great deal to do in this respect. Even in the strictly statistical and accounting field, where an established frame work already exists, there are many problems as is clear from the work done by experts of the Economic Commission for Europe in producing a list of standard national accounting terms in English, French and Russian [6]. The problems are multiplied when one tries to produce mutually com prehensible terminological sets in the relatively uncharted field of economic policy.
We wished to describe some of the recent changes changes in the meanings of the concepts used on either side, and also changes in the actual conduct of economic policy. These changes have come about for many reasons: economic circumstances have altered, with the process of techno logical change, for example, and on both sides the extent of the policy-makers' knowledge of the working of the economic system has improved. We find that such terms as planning, decentralization, integration - even inflation - have tended to shift their meaning. Consequently we have set out to describe and analyze in this book some of the important economic developments which have occured in both eastern and western countries. We have at tempted to explain (without trying to cover too much ground) why in par ticular countries or groups of countries certain shifts in policy occurred, and new techniques were tried (and in some cases abandoned).