Problems in Constructing a New Ex-Post Interbranch Balance of the USSR National Economy (For 1966)

The enormous, ever-increasing scale of socialist construction in the USSR and the expansion and increasing complexity of interbranch and interregional relationships urgently require all possible improvement and perfecting of methods of economic analysis and national economic planning. The elaboration and introduction of new progressive methods of analysis and planning, entailing the use of economic-mathematical methods of research and the latest computer technology, provide the possibility for making thorough and many-sided analyses of the processes taking place in the national economy, for revealing the most important economic proportions and interbranch production relationships, for making multivariant calculations of national economic plans and selecting those that are most advantageous from an economic point of view. The interbranch balance is one of the most important of these methods. As we know, the first attempts to construct an interbranch balance in the USSR date all the way back to the first stage of economic construction. The balance of the national economy drawn up in the USSR for 1923/24 contained a number of tables, the data of which characterized interbranch production relationships. Nonetheless, work on the construction of an interbranch balance did not begin in full measure until the second half of the 1950s. This work was fostered by the development of computer technology and by the fact that greater attention was paid to concrete economic analysis employing mathematical methods.