Comprehensive Program For Socialist Economic Integration - Cooperation in Planning

Cooperation in Planning

If countries are to gain from trade, that trade must be based on rational production structures reflecting resource scarcities. Since the early 1960s, official Comecon documents have stressed the need to promote among members' economies a more cost-effective pattern of specialization in production. This "international socialist division of labor" would, especially in the manufacturing sector, involve specialization within major branches of industry. In the absence of significant, decentralized allocation of resources within these economies, however, production specialization can be brought about only through the mechanism of the national plan and the investment decisions incorporated in it. In the absence at the regional level of supranational planning bodies, a rational pattern of production specialization among members' economies required coordination of national economic plans, a process that was not merely technical but also posed inescapable political problems.

The coordination of national five-year economic plans was the most traditional form of cooperation among the members in the area of planning. Although the process of consultation underlying plan coordination remained essentially bilateral, Comecon organs were indirectly involved. The standing commissions drew up proposals for consideration by competent, national planning bodies; the Secretariat assembled information on the results of bilateral consultations; and the Council Committee for Cooperation in Planning (created by Comecon in 1971 at the same session at which the Comprehensive Program was adopted) reviewed the progress of plan coordination by members.

In principle, plan coordination covered all economic sectors. Effective and comprehensive plan coordination has, however, been significantly impeded by the continued momentum of earlier parallel development strategies and the desire of members to minimize the risks of mutual dependence (especially given the uncertainties of supply that were characteristic of the members' economies). Plan coordination in practice, therefore, remained for the most part limited to mutual adjustment, through bilateral consultation, of the foreign trade sectors of national five-year plans. Under the Comprehensive Program, there were efforts to extend plan coordination beyond foreign trade to the spheres of production, investment, science, and technology.