ABSTRACT
Economic planning was formally put into place when an interconnected set of institutions and procedures, first developed in the Soviet Union, was copied by the East European countries during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Detailed planning and direct supervision of the day-to-day activities of lower economic entities required of an economic ministry a substantially narrower scope, compared with its position as a sectoral centre of economic policymaking; hence the proliferation of economic ministries created by the division of those previously existing. The imperative version of central planning was introduced in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The planners developed quantitative macroeconomic goals for the economy as a whole and then broke them down and divided them up among the branches. Once the traditional system was in place, the leadership also adopted a method of setting prices that mirrored the Soviet model of the 1930s.
