RAND Conference on Models of the Soviet Economy

This report documents a conference to explore issues associated with modeling the Soviet economy to enhance Western capabilities for accurately assessing the Soviet Union's economic prospects and alternatives. Four major large-scale, economy-wide models of the Soviet Union have been developed in the West over the past few years by Wharton Econometrics, the Central Intelligence Agency, Decision-Science Applications, and The RAND Corporation. Representatives of these institutions discussed their experience with large-scale models, the analytical questions addressed, the principal findings to date, and the focus of current work. They described the structure of each model in four areas: (1) the defense sector and its relationship to the economy; (2) foreign trade and its linkage to the domestic economy; (3) energy and its linkage to growth and trade; and (4) accounting for bottlenecks and other constraints. They then assessed the different modeling approaches and suggested possible future directions in Soviet economic analysis.