ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how producing units in the Soviet economy and intermediate planning bodies articulate investment programs and apply pressure for their implementation. It presents evidence to suggest that these executive bodies must bear a large proportion of the immediate responsibility for the excess demand for investment resources that is such a dominant feature of the Soviet economic scene, and for specific distortions of resource allocation present in the investment process. The main deficiency of the economic mechanism enshrined in the industrial-planning experiment lies in its failure to make a substantial impact on the problem of restructuring the system for financing capital investments and the development of production, and for introducing the achievements of science and technology at the enterprise level. Decentralized investment was much featured in the Kosygin planning reform, and by 1972 it accounted for nearly 20 percent of total state investment.
