ABSTRACT
In all the planned economies a counter-balance to extremes of wage differentiation has been the systems of social insurance and other labour amenities available on a wide basis to the working population. These systems have moreover served to take the edge off the burden for the wage earner of the high rate of national investment incident to industrialization. That all these economies regard social insurance as integral to their development can be seen from the fact that, beginning with the Soviet Union, they have established extremely broad systems, or greatly extended their old ones almost immediately, in spite of great material difficulties. And in all such systems the labour movement itself has played a decisive part.
