Economics and politics with in socialist systems: a comparative and development approach

Comparative research on socialist systems is both easier and more difficult than it was at the time when the first socialist countries were developing. It is easier because most of the socialist countries have developed their own original features and are no longer as dependent on imitation of the Soviet model as they used to be in their early days, and because most of them are publishing more and more data that can serve in comparison, whereas in the early days an official atmosphere of secrecy and a distrust in quantitative analysis made comparative studies impossible. The integration of statistical systems within Comecon has unified accounting systems and made quantitative data more open to comparison.
On the other hand, however, comparison would seem to be more difficult than in the 1950s because the socialist countries are becoming increasingly divergent in their ideology, and growing neo-Marxist criticism of the so-called real socialism of existing systems is tending to make the concept of what can actually be called "socialism" more and more uncertain.