ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals a lively awareness of many of the requirements of a price-policy, as well as a refreshing empiricism. It deals with specific problems of price-fixing in the main sectors of the economy: fuel and power, metals and engineering, building materials, prices for agriculture and raw materials, transport and retail prices of consumer goods. There are plenty of references to the need for prices to be so fixed as to encourage a rational output-pattern on the part of producing industries and to encourage rational utilisation of supplies and transport services by purchasers. The uniform delivered prices encourage long hauls and discourage economy in transport. It is accordingly surprising at first sight to find the system so widely used in Soviet industry, and to find it so warmly advocated by Professor Turetski as a rational device. It might seem the more surprising in view of the constant appeals that have been made to reduce the extent of ‘irrational long hauls’.
