Abstract
Social policy can mean different things to different people and I must specify how I shall be using the term in this chapter. At the risk of some oversimplification one can identify three determinants of living standards in the USSR: wages (together with earnings from private agricultural or other second-economy activities), transfer payments (pensions, etc.) and the value of services such as education provided free of charge (or at subsidised prices) by the state. The same three components determine the living standards of most families in all modern industrial economies. Soviet economists categorise the resources committed to transfers and to ‘free’ services as social con-sumption funds. By social policy I mean policies concerned with the character, composition and allocation of these social consumption funds — and with the ways in which they are financed.
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Notes
A. McAuley, ‘Social Welfare under Socialism: a study of Soviet attitudes to redistribution’, in D. Collard et al. (eds), Income Distribution: the Limits to Redistribution (Bristol, 1980 ), pp. 238–58.
See also A. McAuley, Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union ( Madison, Wisconsin and London, 1979 ).
V. S. Kulikov, Rol’ finansov v povyshenii blagosostoyaniya sovetskogo naroda (Moscow, 1972 ), p. 58.
B. V. Rakitsky, Obshchestvennye fondy potrebleniya kak ekonomicheskaya kategoriya (Moscow, 1967 ).
M. Elizabeth Denton, ‘Soviet Consumer Policy: Trends and Prospects’, in Joint Economic Committee Soviet Economy in a Time of Change (Washington DC, 1979), pp. 760–89, especially p. 767.
V. N. Semenov, ‘Programma dalneyshego ukrepleniya ekonomiki i finansov kolkhozov i sovkhozov’, Finansy SSSR No. 10, 1978, pp. 3–13, especially p. 11.
Bernice Q. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union ( Stanford, Calfornia, 1968 ), Chapter 11.
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© 1982 St Antony’s College, Oxford
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McAuley, A. (1982). Social Policy. In: Brown, A., Kaser, M. (eds) Soviet Policy for the 1980s. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16948-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16948-1_6
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