ABSTRACT
The development of the Soviet economy since the second half of the 1970s, differed qualitatively from earlier periods in that there was an absolute decline in the increments to capital and labor resources. The slump in investment activity which occurred in the late 1970s is entirely without precedent for a peacetime Soviet economy. The distribution of capital investments within the national economy as a whole changed somewhat in the late '70s. The intensification of production must be manifested in an increase in return on capital or a reduction in the capital coefficient. Numerous data published in the Soviet press attest to the sharp increase in the cost per unit of capacity of equipment put into operation during the 1970s. Most common is the growth of the size and weight of equipment per unit of productive capacity. The average current production costs in construction work, which decreased during 1971-1975, showed a tendency to increase during the second half of the 1970s.
