IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-10349-2_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

General Results

In: Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA

Author

Listed:
  • Igor Birman

Abstract

Briefly about the major conclusions: The study starts with a reminder that about 20 years ago the CPSU promised to provide ‘the highest living standard in the world by 1980’. In October 1961, the Twenty-Second Party Congress adopted a new programme which stated: ‘the CPSU poses a task of worldwide historical significance — to provide the highest standard of living in the USSR compared with any country of capitalism’.1 Although the text does not speak precisely of 1980, other parts of the programme and also Khrushchev’s speech presenting the programme to the Congress leave no doubt here.2 The CIA study says (v–vi): Events have turned out quite differently. Real per capita consumption in the USSR currently is less than a third of that in the United States. The gap was narrowed in the 1960s, but began to widen in the 1970s. The Soviets also lag far behind the major West European countries and Japan, and except for the United Kingdom, the differences have increased considerably since 1960 … Over the past 20 years, the Soviets have made the most progress in ‘catching up’ in food, soft goods, and durables, but have retrogressed relative to the United States in housing, recreation, education, and health … We estimate … the Soviet level [of per capita consumption] to be roughly half that of West Germany and France, about two-thirds of that in Japan, and about three-fourths of the level in Italy … Soviet consumers are also less well off than consumers in most of Eastern Europe … The pattern of expenditures on consumption in the USSR is markedly different from that in the United States and Western Europe, and the differences are greater than might be expected from levels of development … The Soviet pattern in many respects conforms to that in the less developed countries, and remarkably little progress toward a more modern pattern has been made in recent decades. In this and other respects, the USSR is indeed the world’s most underdeveloped developed country.

Suggested Citation

  • Igor Birman, 1989. "General Results," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA, chapter 4, pages 25-32, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-10349-2_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10349-2_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-10349-2_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.