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Stalinism, Political Economy of

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Abstract

This article describes the economic working arrangements put in place in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s by Stalin from the vantage point of Mises’ and Hayek’s scepticism about the feasibility of socialism. It describes the high-level management of the economy, the dictator’s curse, the ad hoc nature of planning, the handling of principal–agent problems, the management of worker morale, the manner in which investment was maximized, the dictator’s aversion to rules, and the use of coercion to achieve economic goals. Stalin’s use of forced labour in his Gulag system is described as coercion failure.

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Gregory, P.R. (2018). Stalinism, Political Economy of. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2567

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