Discussion of the Paper by Professor Lindbeck

Dr Habr began his comments by observing that the paper was in the tradition of comparative systems analysis, a field in which the main difficulty was the lack of appropriate conceptual tools to deal with the great variety of national experiences. He questioned the efficiency criteria on which Professor Lindbeck based his own comparisons. First, the empirical evidence to which these criteria could be directly applied was very limited. Second, the theoretical basis for these concepts had not been developed in similar ways in Eastern and Western countries. Professor Lindbeck neglected the reasons for and implications of these differences in approach. For example, marginal concepts have been given greater attention in the West, average concepts in the East. Third, the criteria were of different sorts. Some were closely tied to reality, and it was easy to give them empirical content: innovation, product development and informational efficiency fell into this category. Others were more abstract and sophisticated, and consequently it was necessary to discuss them in the context of a specific model; an example here would be the representation of efficiency as a point on a transformation frontier. In doing this, however, we risked diverting our attention towards questioning the underlying models and their assumptions, to the neglect of the empirical data which we wanted to analyse for comparative purposes. More generally, he felt that some conceptual tools might themselves be system-tied and therefore ideologically biased in comparing planning and competition. In discussing technological efficiency, for example, Western concern focused on the problems of attaining the transformation frontier, while Eastern emphasis was on going beyond the ex ante known feasible space. In socialist countries ‘mobilisation of resources’ was supposed to transform the potential feasible space into a real one, even at the cost of static inefficiency.