command economy

command economy Not to be confused with its associated feature the planned economy, the paradigm case is the neo-Stalinist, centrally directed, state-owned economy of the Soviet Union. A continuum can be elaborated, within which communist economic systems can be located in terms of whether they seek to centralize all or some of the decisions relating to macroeconomic policy, enterprise-level activity, and household behaviour concerning employment and consumption. The type of economy which existed in post-revolutionary Russia faced with civil war between 1918 and 1921—namely war communism—centralizes all of the above spheres of decision-making. The command economy centralizes the first two dimensions but leaves some scope for local-level decisions as regards the third. So-called market socialism decentralizes all three—although state ownership remains. Many of the pathologies attributed to planned (or ‘administered’, ‘managed’, or ‘non-market’) economies are in fact evident only in the specifically command version. See also STALINISM.