The New Economic System (German: Neues Ökonomisches System) was an economic policy that was implemented by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1963. Its purpose was to replace the system of Five Year Plans which had been used to run the GDR's economy from 1951 onwards. The System was introduced by Walter Ulbricht in order to give centralised control to the economy to be run in as efficient a manner as possible.
Its main aims were to reduce the wastage of raw materials, increase the level of mechanisation used in production methods and, most significantly, to create a system in which quality rather than quantity was foremost. It was also used to rebuild the economy following the Republikflucht which had devastated the GDR's economy prior to the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961.
The System was largely successful and was replaced in 1968 by the Economic System of Socialism which concentrated on building up the GDR's hi-tech industries.
Read more about New Economic System: See Also
Famous quotes containing the words economic system, economic and/or system:
“Politics at all times lead to bloody wars, and not only politics, but also religions as well as social and economic systems of all times are spattered with blood. Invariably the big ones devoured the little ones, and the little ones the tiny ones.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)