On One of the Deep-seated Causes of the Soviet Economy's State of Crisis

In recent years the Soviet economy has been going through a protracted crisis that has now gripped all its spheres and is manifested in the lowering of the absolute volume of production, in serious disproportions between production and consumption, in the increasing gap between the population's money incomes and goods on which to spend them, in the disruption of monetary circulation and economic relations, in the growth of inflation, etc. The summary of the USSR State Committee for Statistics [>i>Goskomstat>/i>] for 1990 attests to this quite convincingly. Thus, the gross national product declined by 2 percent; produced national income, by 4 percent; and the productivity of social labor, by 3 percent Foreign-trade turnover declined by almost 7 percent; the negative foreign-trade balance reached 10 billion foreign-currency rubles [>i>invaliutnyi rubl>/i>]; and the state budget deficit totaled 58 billion rubles.>sup>1>/sup> The further relatively more rapid growth of the population's money incomes compared with the increase in the production of goods and services has led to the intensification of inflationary processes and to the disintegration of the consumer market.