THE ADVERSARY SYSTEM IN LOW-LEVEL SOVIET ECONOMIC DECISIONMAKING (COMPUTERS, TRACTORS, CHEMICAL EQUIPMENT)

This essay considers low-level economic decisionmaking in Soviet nondefense industry. In particular, it considers industrial structure and decisionmaking processes affecting choices such as that between importing foreign technology and investment in domestic research and development in three machinery sectors: computers, agricultural machinebuilding, and chemical/petrochemical equipment construction. There emerges a pattern of industrial conflict between suppliers and clients that seems to lack any fixed predictable form of conflict resolution. Such a situation in Soviet industry does indeed permit the expression of numerous conflicting interests. But it lacks the routine forms of conflict resolution that permit a market to overcome its tensions or a parliament to reach consensus on delicate issues. A consequence of this appears to be the importance of the influence of the domestic client of Soviet machinery ministries in determining decisions affecting trade outcomes, as the three case studies illustrate.;This influence takes the form of variance in the quality of information about strains in industrial sectors that becomes available to central decisionmakers as a result of client-supplier interaction. The quality of this information varies with the amount of attention a client is likely to turn to the supply of the component in question, all other things being equal. The amount of client managerial attention expended on a component appears to depend on the availability of substitutes for the components, the pressure from the center on the client to perform, the sensitivity of the client's product's performance to the component's performance, the rate of change of component technology, and (in some situations) the cost share of the component.