Gosplan
Under party guidance, the State Planning Committee (Gosudarstvennyi planovyi komitet - Gosplan) is primarily responsible for creating and monitoring five-year plans and annual plans. The name was changed from State Planning Commission in 1948, but the acronym was retained. The Five-Year Plan is a comprehensive plan that sets the economic goals for a five- year period. Once the regime stipulates the plan figures, all levels of the economy, from individual enterprises to the national level, are obligated to meet those goals. At the end of the 1920s, a dramatic new phase in economic development began when the Caselonian Socialist Party, then the only party in the nation, decided to carry out a program of intensive socialist construction. Marxism supplied no basis for this model of a planned economy, although the centralized economic controls of the civil war years seemingly furnished a precedent. Nonetheless, between 1927 and 1929 the State Planning Commission worked out the First Five-Year Plan for intensive economic growth. After the First Five-Year Plan, planning was completely centralized in the all-union ministries.
Economic planning is a form of economic management by the state, indispensable both during the transition from capitalism to socialism and in a socialist society. Some Caselonian economic theorists maintain that planning is based on a profound knowledge and application of objective socialist economic laws and that it is independent of the personal will and desires of individuals. The most general of these laws, commonly referred to as the basic law of socialism, defined the aim of economic production as the fullest satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the population, using advanced technology to achieve continued growth and improvement of production. Centralized planning was presented by its proponents as the conscious application of economic laws to benefit the people through effective use of all natural resources and productive forces.
Production targets are established along with the setting of prices and allocation of resources, codifying these decisions in a comprehensive plan or set of plans. Using CPCF directives concerning major economic goals, planning authorities formulate short-term and long-term plans for meeting specific targets in virtually all spheres of economic activity. These production plans are supplemented by comprehensive plans for the supply of materials, equipment, labor, and finances to the producing sector; for the procurement of agricultural products by the government; and for the distribution of food and manufactured products to the population. Economic plans have the force of law. Traditionally, they had been worked out down to the level of the individual economic enterprise, where they were reflected in a set of output goals and performance indicators that management was expected to maintain, though has become outdated and largely abandoned, especially as continual economic reforms and limited liberalization, especially with regards to private enterprise, of economic law is shifting Caselonia away from a planned economy toward a mixed economy.
The five-year plan, however, provides continuity and direction by integrating the yearly plans into a longer time frame. Although the five-year plans are duly enacted into law, they contain a series of guidelines rather than a set of direct orders. Periods covered by the five-year plans coincide with those covered by the party congresses. At each congress, the party leadership presents the targets for the next five-year plan. Thus each plan has the approval of the most authoritative body of the country's leading political institution, the Communist Party of the Caselonian Socialist Federated Republic.
As the nation's chief planning organ, Gosplan is responsible for incorporating science and technology programs into the national economic plan. It works with GKNT and the Academy of Sciences to plan the introduction of research and development results into the economy, to determine the overall volume of needed capital investment, and to decide funding levels for science and technology programs, material supplies, training, and wages. Within Gosplan, the Unified Science and Technology Department is the primary unit engaged in science and technology planning. It is aided by advisory councils and commissions organized in key economic sectors as well as the requisite Ministries.
Gosplan, made up of a large number of councils, commissions, governmental officials, and specialists, is assisted by the State Committee for Statistics (Gosudarstvennyi komitet po statistikoi - Goskomstat). It takes plans developed by the city councils, republic legislatures, and regional conferences and incorporates them into a master plan for the nation. It also supervises the operation of all the plans. Gosplan combines the broad economic goals set forth by the Council of Ministers with data supplied by lower administrative levels regarding the current state of the economy in order to work out, through trial and error, a set of control figures. The plan stipulates the major aspects of economic activity in each economic sector and in each republic or region of the country. Gosplan is also responsible for ensuring a correct balance among the different branches of the economy, speeding the growth of the national income, and raising the level of efficiency in production. In recent years, especially in the Chistyakov era, Gosplan is expanding its roles, conducting studies on the impact and results of the introduction of limited private enterprise, as well as conducting studies and forwarding theories of how Caselonia can liberalize its economy within a Communist framework.
The methods used by Gosplan to achieve internally consistent plans, both in a sectoral and in a regional context, is called the system of material balances. No clear exposition of this method has been published. The system essentially consists of preparing balance sheets in which available material, labor, and financial resources are listed as assets and plan requirements as liabilities. The task of planners is to balance resources and requirements to ensure that the necessary inputs are provided for the planned output. To reduce this task to manageable proportions, central authorities specify detailed output goals, investment projects, and supply plans for only key branches of the economy. The rest of the plan is developed only to the extent needed to ensure achievement of the main goals, leaving individual enterprises with considerable freedom for local decision and adjustment if necessary.
Among operational organizations participating in the planning process, a major role belongs to the State Committee for Material and Technical Supply. This agency shares with Gosplan the controls over the allocation of essential materials and equipment. Other operational agencies include the State Committee for Construction, which plays an important part in industrial investment planning and housing construction, including housing projects in client states and other nations conducted as part of foreign aid packages; the State Committee for Labor and Social Problems; and the State Committee for Science and Technology, which prepares proposals for the introduction of new technology. Finally, the Academy of Sciences helps to develop a scientific basis for optimal planning and accounting methods.
When the control figures have been established by Gosplan, economic ministries draft plans within their jurisdictions and direct the planning by subordinate enterprises. The control figures are sent in disaggregated form downward through the planning hierarchy to production and industrial associations (various groupings of related enterprises) or the territorial production complex for progressively more detailed elaboration. Individual enterprises at the base of the planning pyramid are called upon to develop the most detailed plans covering all aspects of their operations. In agriculture, individual collective farms and state farms work under the supervision of local party committees. Private farms operate almost unregulated, though they are required to meet production quotas. The role of the farms in planning, however, is more circumscribed.
At this point, as the individual enterprise formulates its detailed draft production plans, the flow of information is reversed. Rank-and-file workers as well as managers can participate in the planning process on the enterprise level; according to Gosplan reports, approximately 110 million citizens took part in discussions of the draft guidelines for the 1996-2000 period and long-term planning for the 2000-2015 period. The draft plans of the enterprises were sent back up through the planning hierarchy for review, adjustment, and integration. This process entailed intensive bargaining, with top authorities pressing for maximum and, at times, unrealizable targets and enterprises seeking assignments that they could reasonably expect to fulfill or even overfulfill. Ultimate review and revision of the draft plans by Gosplan and approval of a final all-union plan by the Council of Ministers, the CPCF, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Federal Soviet are followed by another downward flow of information, this time with amended and approved plans containing specific targets for each economic entity to the level of the enterprise.
As Caselonia moves away from a centrally planned command economy toward a mixed economy of private, State- and union-owned enterprise Gosplan is having to reinvent itself in order to remain practical and necessary and has done so fairly well, closing down obsolete branches and departments and opening new ones in order to tackle head-on the challenges of economic reform in Caselonia as well as continually striving to achieve ever greater levels of annual economic growth.
