ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that in the socialist countries from the time of the Soviet debates in the 1920s through to the present day, there have been two fundamentally opposed visions of rural development. In the Soviet Union, the 'NEP model' re-emerged as an explicit rallying point for market socialist ideas in the post-Stalinist period, Gorbachev is reported as having said to top party officials in 1986: 'When NEP was introduced, people's living standards rose fourfold. The book demonstrates that the individual peasant households have a high propensity to save and accumulate capital. It also argues that collective farms are a useful institutional form for raising the rate of rural saving and investment, for helping to solve local poverty, for ensuring limited intra-village income inequality and a high degree of mobility in income positions within the village.
