The key to Soviet economic reform is competition. Cultural inertia, ideology, and vested privilege discourage competition. The attempts at reform have achieved no significant breakthrough in the state sector. In the non-state sector the situation is more promising. To the extent that the new Law...

It is not unusual for reforming socialist economies to relax wage controls without hardening budget constraints on enterprises or freeing consumer goods prices. This policy can be dangerously destabilizing. While higher wages permit workers to purchase more of some goods, they also tend to...

An agent of unknown expertise is requested to forecast the mean of an uncertain outcome. The agent can refine forecasts at a constant marginal cost per unit precision, but neither cost nor precision can be verified by the planner. The problem is to induce both truthful revelation and an...

Energy exports, which are already the primary source of Soviet convertible currency earnings and an important contributor to the budget, could bring in much more revenue if the Soviet Union were to reduce its extremely high levels of energy consumption. To encourage this process, energy prices...

It is not unusual for reforming socialist economies to relax wage controls without hardening budget constraints on enterprises or freeing consumer goods prices. This policy can be dangerously destabilizing. While higher wages permit workers to purchase more of some goods, they also tend to...

This paper provides an analytic overview of independent currency authorities (ICAs), sometimes called currency boards. ICAs issue and redeem domestic currency against an exchange standard on demand and back such operations through a 100 percent marginal foreign reserve cover. They also impose...

In several recent articles, the Barro-Grossman model of general equilibrium under shortage has been modified to incorporate money demand and alternative retail sales mechanisms. This paper extends this work to allow for spillovers in deficit goods markets (modeled as feedback of black market...