Background
ELLMAN, Michael John was born in 1942 in Ripley, Surrey, England.
(Socialist planning played an enormous role in the economi...)
Socialist planning played an enormous role in the economic and political history of the twentieth century. Beginning in the USSR it spread round the world. It influenced economic institutions and economic policy in countries as varied as Bulgaria, USA, China, Japan, India, Poland and France. How did it work? What were its weaknesses and strengths? What is its legacy for the twenty-first century? Now in its third edition, this textbook is fully updated to cover the findings of the period since the collapse of the USSR. It provides an overview of socialist planning, explains the underlying theory and its limitations, looks at its implementation in various sectors of the economy, and places developments in their historical context. A new chapter analyses how planning worked in the defence-industrial complex. This book is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in comparative economic systems and twentieth-century economic history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1107427320/?tag=2022091-20
(First published as a second edition in 1989, Socialist Pl...)
First published as a second edition in 1989, Socialist Planning presented a fully revised and updated edition of a book that had established itself as the standard introductory text on the economics of socialist planning. It was intended to provide the reader with a grasp of the theoretical ideas and empirical knowledge that explain the historical experience of socialist planning, problems in the state socialist countries of the late eighties, and the comparative efficiency of socialist planning and market capitalism. While the structure of the second edition remained basically unchanged each chapter incorporated empirical evidence of the changes that took place since the mid-seventies, along with the ideological developments related to these changes. The book will remain valuable, primarily for its historical interest, but also for its combination of theory and practice, the analytical perspective and careful selection of material, and in the attention paid to analyses by politicians and economists from the socialist countries themselves.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521358663/?tag=2022091-20
ELLMAN, Michael John was born in 1942 in Ripley, Surrey, England.
Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1966, 1972. Master of Science London School of Economies and Political Science, London, United Kingdom, 1965.
Lector Economics, Glasgow University, 1967-1969. Research Officer, Senior Research Officer, Department Applied Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1969-1975. Reader Economics, Amsterdam University, 1975-1978.
Visiting Professor Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands, 1983.
Professor of Economics, University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands,
1978-. Association Editor, Cambridge Journal of Economics.
Editorial Board, Matekon.
(First published as a second edition in 1989, Socialist Pl...)
(Socialist planning played an enormous role in the economi...)
My work has ranged across the whole area of comparative economic systems, from welfare economics to Marxist-Leninist theory, from the Polish crisis of 1979-1982 to the crisis of the welfare state. My main contributions have concerned Soviet economic thought, planning techniques, economic reform under State Socialism, Marxist theory, the economics of the collectivisation of agriculture and the convergence theory. In my book and articles on Soviet economic thought (in particular the discussion of the 1960s about the use of mathematical methods), I provided a well documented internalist account of this development.
I also provided, however, unlike other Western commentators on this discussion, an externalist critique of the significance of this debate. Furthermore, I related the
theoretical discussions to real planning problems and the ability (or otherwise) of mathematical methods to resolve them. My work on planning techniques made clear what input-output and linear programming can not do.
lieutenant also described where they are being used successfully to raise the efficiency of planning. My contribution to knowledge of economic reform consists of detailed empirical studies of attempted changes plus stress on economic reform as a matter of political and social choice. In my work on the economics of collectivisation, I argued that Soviet industrialisation was not financed by an increased transfer of surplus from the peasantry, but was financed mainly by ‘the selfexploitation of the working-class’.
In a widely referred to paper (and subsequent discussion), I criticised the Tinbergian variant of the convergence theory as misleading and harmful.