Abstract
The end of the East-West conflict caused a shift in the conversion issue from an academic and trade-unionist debate to actual affairs. Today conversion is a serious concern for local and regional policymakers, for headquarters of the arms industry and for their employees. By now the societies of Western and Eastern Europe have accumulated a certain amount of experience in arms industry conversion. Now, the learning stages and processes in the handling of the conversion issue, especially in the CIS and the former WTO member states, can be discerned.
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References
United Nations, Human Development Report 1992, New York/Oxford (Oxford University Press) 1992, p. 86.
Jacques Sapir, Les fluctuations economiques en URSS 1941–1985, Paris (Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) 1989.
Among the sources of these funds, the deviation of investment allocations provided by the government and the income from sales of real estate as well as sales of stocks of semi-manufacturers and raw materials figure prominently.
Such minimum levels often become supplemented by payments in kind earned through barter transactions, or a company organising wholesale purchases of consumer articles on behalf of the employees.
In the absence of clear legal rules, such moves require the collusion of, among others, the state bureaucracy, thus opening all gateways for corruption. This provides for another operational link with a UN institution, the World Bank, and its programme to combat corruption, via a special institution, Transparency International (in which the present author is in charge of corruption in the arms business).
In the old system of planned economies, withdrawing additional government credit above the limits set by the plan was punished rigorously with an imposed interest rate of 30%. The inertia of the bureaucracy which stuck to the old rules provided the VPK with a source of highly subsidized credits as the monthly rate of inflation approached this percentage (hint by Dr. Ksenia Gonchar, Moscow).
US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Building Future Security, Washington, DC (GPO), June, 1992. The European experience is discussed in: Ulrich Albrecht, Die Nutzung und der Nutzen militärischer FuE-Ergebnisse für zivile Anwendungen (The Use of Military R&D Results for Civilian Application), Cologne, Germany (TÜV Rheinland: Technology Transfer Series, vol. 14) 1989.
The Feasibility Study for this UNU RTC is available from the present author.
See the “Conceptual Paper,” prepared by (my long-term team colleague) Dr. Herbert Wulf for the Ministry of Science and Research, Foundation of the international Centre for Conversion, Bonn, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, June, 1993.
Ibid., p. 2.
Gediminas Rainys, “Economic Reform and Defence Industry Conversion in Lithuania,” Bonn International Centre for Conversion, Report 3, Conversion of the Defence Industry in Russia and Eastern Europe, Bonn, 1995 (obtainable from BICC, An der Elisabethkirche 25, D-53113 Bonn).
Contact: Dr. Peter Lock/eART, Auf der Koppel 40, D-22399 Hamburg, Tel/Fax 49-40-602 7972, e-mail:eartpl@oln.apc.org
The MA thesis of the first two candidates is obtainable from the Lund Institute of Technology, Department of industrial Engineering (Magnus Larsson, Hans Nilsson, Conversion of Shipyard No. 7 in Tallinn, Estonia — not only a military/civilian conversion, Lund, 1992).
Interviews conducted by Dr. Ksenia Gonchar and Dr. Yevgeny Kuznetsov in the so-called Northwestern Region (near St. Petersburg). Credits and thanks to these two Russian colleagues for this section.
The famed Kirovsky Zavod (in Czarist times the even more famous Putilov works, a main scene of the October Revolution) in St. Petersburg — 50,000 plus employees, forms an outstanding example. In order to save viable parts of this giant enterprise, the firm has been subdivided into dozens of smaller entities, which still represent formidable firms.
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Albrecht, U. (1996). Conversion Policies in an International Perspective: German Policies in the Baltic Sea Region. In: Prunskienė, K., Altvater, E. (eds) Transformation, Co-operation, and Conversion. NATO ASI Series, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1754-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1754-5_16
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