ABSTRACT

It was shown in Chapters 4 and 5 that Soviet economic growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s was constrained by the inability to generate a sufficient volume of hard currency exports to finance the level of imports of machinery and equipment which were necessary for industrial modernisation and capital formation, foodstuffs which were largely required to compensate for deficiencies in the structure of agriculture and food distribution, and consumer goods which were required to stabilise the domestic market.