ABSTRACT
Since Mr. Gorbachev became General Secretary in March 1985 and had, at a Central Committee Plenum the following month, launched a program aimed at promoting technical progress to reverse a serious decline in Soviet economic growth. Both have their impact on East-West economic relations and involve three related concepts—the "technology gap," the "imports first" policy in relation to comparative advantage, and the "absorption" of transferred technology. They help to satisfy people urgent needs more fully and remove the "black" economy and all possible forms of abuse, that is, they help the real process of improving socioeconomic relations. The application of scientific and technological research results in sales to the West by the USSR and other Eastern European countries, as John Kiser has shown. In the Soviet administrative structure, technological research and development is isolated from production facilities; each set of the latter less than one industrial ministry is insufficiently linked to those of another ministry.
