Abstract
The Soviet-American détente of the early 1970s has been perhaps the most striking development in Russia’s dealings with the outside world since the fall of Khrushchev. It can be argued, however, that it is only part of a more general and more gradual improvement in East-West relations, first expressed in Soviet doctrine by Khrushchev’s formula of peaceful coexistence.
Research assistance by Mr Iancu Spigler are gratefully acknowledged. A number of people made helpful comments on earlier drafts, and I would particularly like to thank Carl McMillan, Paul Marer and Hugo Radice. I am also indebted at several points in this essay to the ideas of Stanislaw Gomulka.
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Notes
The most extensive recent study of the post Second World War period is by A. C. Sutton, in the third volume of his polemical but informative study of Soviet acquisition of western technology, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1945–1965 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973 ).A number of studies are under way at the University of Birmingham of comparative Soviet-western technology levels in particular fields. The results so far seem to support the view that the USSR lags considerably behind the West in computer, control and instrumentation equipment, chemicals and some machine-tool technologies, but not in high-voltage power transmission.
See J. M. Cooper, ‘The Concept of the Scientific-Technical Revolution in Soviet Theory’, Centre for Russian and East European Studies Discussion Paper, University of Birmingham (1973).
The quotation is from M. Maksimova in Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, no. 4 (1974) p. 15. Virtually the same statement is made by O. Bogomolov in Kommunist, no. 5 (1974) p. 89. Brezhnev himself makes the same point in his speech on 26 October 1973 to the World Congress of Peace-Loving Forces in Moscow.
M. L. Gorodissky, Litsenzii vo vneshnei torgovle SSSR (Moscow, 1972 ) pp. 135 (establishment of Litsenzingorg), 144 (Soviet accession to the Paris Convention; the imputation of motives is my own), 183 (planning of licence acquisition and use).
The IMEMO projection of world licence trade is cited by Maksimova, op. cit., p. 17. It is not clear whether the projection is of licence trade between western countries alone or between all countries. The analogy between western transnationale and the Comecon international associations is made by Yu. Shiryaev in Planovoe Khozyaistvo, no. 4 (1974) pp. 35–6.
Japanese experience is cited by S. A. Kheinman in A. I. Notkin (eds), Faktory ekonomicheskogo razvitiya SSSR (Moscow, 1970 ) p. 57.
and at some length by N. Smelyakov, ‘Delovye vstrechi’, Novyi Mir, no. 12 (1973) pp. 228–9.
S. Gomulka, in his Inventive Activity, Diffusion and the Stages of Economic Growth (Aarhus, 1971)argues that the overall rate of technical progress of a country absorbing technology from another, more advanced country, will be produced by the joint impact of its own indigenous technical change and of technology transfer from abroad, but that in a middle-level industrialised economy the latter will be the dominant influence and aggregate technical change will tend to approach the rate which would be generated by diffusion from abroad alone. This convergence of the growth rates of overall technical progress and of diffusion from abroad will only occur, however, when the latter, by growing faster than indigenous innovation, has acquired an overwhelming weight in the determination of the economy’s rate of technical progress. We cannot say, a priori, for the Soviet Union or any other ‘middle-level’ country, whether diffusion from abroad actually has at any given time an overwhelming role in technical change. The problem of identifying and measuring indigenous innovation and diffusion from abroad remains.
The statistics in OECD, Gaps in Technology, Comparisons between Member Countries (Paris, 1970), and the case-studies in J. Jewkes, D. Sawers and R. Stillerman, The Sources of Invention, 2nd ed. (London, 1969),bring out this interdependence clearly.
Mark S. Massell, ‘The International Patent System’, Journal of Economic Issues, no. 4 (1973) p. 646, notes that the percentage of US patents granted to non-residents rose from seventeen in 1961 to twenty-nine in 1971.
The overall US dominance of international know-how trade is however beyond dispute. The chapter by J. H. Dunning in C. P. Kindleberger (ed.), The International Corporation ( Cambridge, Mass, 1970 ) contains interesting evidence for the view that US subsidiaries in Europe contributed significantly to West European technical change and thus economic growth in the 1950s.
This formulation follows the approach used by S. Gomulka in some recent econometric work on technology transfer. S. Gomulka, ‘Investment Import, Technical Change and Economic Growth; A Generalised Capital-Vintage Model’, paper delivered to the Oslo Econometric Meeting (Aug 1973), and S. Gomulka and J. D. Sylwestrowicz, ‘Import-led Growth: Theory and Estimation’, in F. L. Altmann, O. Kÿn, H. J. Wagener (eds.), On the Measurement of Factor Productivity: Theoretical Problems and Empirical Results (Gottingen, 1976 ) pp. 539–78.
A recent tentative western estimate of concealed inflation in Soviet official machinery price indexes suggests that this statement should be slightly modified. A. S. Becker, ‘The Price Level of Soviet Machinery in the 1960’s’, Soviet Studies (July 1974), suggests that an approximate 25 per cent increase occurred in industry wholesale prices of machinery between 1958 and 1970. If we accept this provisional but well-documented assessment, the import share figure (column F) for 1970 becomes 2.1. The most plausible picture of the change in the ‘true’ share would then be from about 2 per cent in the mid-1950s to about 4 per cent in 1970. This should perhaps be described as a perceptible, though not substantial, increase.
M. R. Hill, ‘Aspects of Quality Control Regulation in the USSR’, mimeo (Loughborough, 1973 ).
W. G. Allinson, ‘High Voltage Power Transmission in USSR’, manuscript (Birmingham, 1974 ) p. 12, states that imports of high-voltage air-blast circuit breakers from France in 1957 may have been of critical importance to the Soviet move to 500 kV power transmission.
P. Desai, ‘Technical Change, Factor Elasticity of Substitution and Returns to Scale in Branches of Soviet Industry in the Postwar Period’, mimeo (1974).
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© 1978 Philip Hanson
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Hanson, P. (1978). The Import of Western Technology. In: Brown, A., Kaser, M. (eds) The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15847-8_2
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