Scientific-Technical Progress and The Effectiveness of Science

The importance that scientific and technical progress and the science upon which it is based hold for the development of contemporary production is common knowledge. Unfortunately, not all aspects of the given problem have been completely investigated. This is particularly true of the quantitative interdependence between labor productivity and scientific and technical progress and problems associated with obtaining information required for the calculations. On the one hand, all these things lead to the publication in economics literature of a number of abstract models, proposals, and suggestions that have no real content, and, on the other hand, they lead to certain discrepancies in planning and in the incorporation of advances of scientific and technical progress in a socialist national economy, which are especially intolerable at the present time in connection with the new tasks posed by the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Accordingly, the present work examines some of the questions that are associated with the solution of this problem and with the management of progress in science and technology.