On the short‐run allocation of economic resources by the Soviet and post‐Soviet enterprises

Abstract

The purposes of this paper is purely theoretical. Its goal is to establish some rules governing the short‐run employment of productive resources by the enterprise in the Soviet and post‐Soviet setting. Accordingly, the paper is divided into two parts. The first portion of the paper deals with the behavior of the enterprise as the short‐run user of productive resources within a framework of the Soviet economic model of state ownership of non‐labor economic resources and mandatory central planning. Such an enterprise is termed the Soviet enterprise. In the second part, the paper examines how the former Soviet enterprise exploits factors of production during the current transitional period of the disintegration of the Soviet economic model in modern Russia. This enterprise is called the post‐Soviet enterprise. The paper utilizes the marginalist microeconomic tools of the analysis. In this, the paper applies the traditional neoclassical approach to the nontraditional economic structure of the Soviet and post‐Soviet periods.