Dead Ends of Coordination: the Problem of Joint Planning of Economic Development of the USSR and the CMEA Countries in the 1970s

The article reveals the mechanism for coordinating development plans of the CMEA countries that emerged after the adoption of the Comprehensive Program of Socialist Economic Integration in 1971. The article highlights the ideas for its improvement that were put forward in the first half of the 1970s. The article presents the reasons why the USSR State Planning Committee actually opposed the ideas of developing a more holistic approach to planning foreign economic activity and increasing the independence of both the CMEA structures and the Soviet sectoral ministries. Fuel and raw material exports to the CMEA countries were unprofitable for the USSR under the terms of foreign trade at that time. In order to minimize Soviet losses, large-scale projects for the joint construction of extractive enterprises began to develop, which absorbed almost all the attention of the USSR State Planning Committee. As a result, it was forced to transfer issues of increasing the efficiency of the Soviet economy through the international division of labor to the level of sectoral ministries, which in the Soviet system had neither the resources nor the authority to effectively resolve them.