Grigorii Alexandrovic Fel’dman

Abstract

Fel’dman was one of the founders of the theory of economic growth under socialism, the economics of planning and development economics. An electrical engineer by profession, he worked in Gosplan from February 1923 to January 1931. It was in this period that his contribution to economics was made. At first he was in the department analysing and forecasting developments in the world economy (he concentrated on Germany and the USA). His first work on the theory of growth was a comparative study of the structure and dynamics of the US economy in 1850–1925 with projections of the Soviet economy between 1926/27 and 1940/41. His most important work (‘On the theory of the rates of growth of the national income’) was a report to Gosplan’s committee for compiling a long-term plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR. It was published in two parts in Gosplan’s journal in 1928. A year later Fel’dman published a paper which provides a more popular presentation of how to utilize his ideas to calculate long term plans. The ideas of Fel’dman formed the methodological basis for the preliminary draft of a long term plan worked out by the committee, then headed by N.A. Kovalevskii. This draft was discussed at meetings of Gosplan’s economic research institute in February and March 1930. Apart from this serious discussion, during 1930 Fel’dman came under public attack for his ideas. His reliance on mathematics and his lack of fanaticism did not fit in well with the political fervour of 1930. The concrete numerical work of Fel’dman and Kovalevskii in 1928/30 was much too optimistic. It treated as feasible entirely unrealizable goals. The attempt to realize them had disastrous effects on the economy. Unfortunately, the political situation in the USSR prevented Fel’dman from publishing anything on economics after 1930. Even when, in 1933, he reverted from the sensitive subject of socialist industrialization to the problems of capitalist growth, his book was not published.