The reform-minded Soviet leadership is in the process of devising a new system of economic reforms, generally referred to as "perestroika". In the Soviet Union, proposed changes in the economic system require ideological justification. An important case in point is the Soviet experiment with a mixed economy, called the New Economic Policy, or NEP, from March of 1921 to the adoption of the first five year plan in 1928. The new Soviet leadership has made references to the NEP period as a possible model for combining market and plan. Of particular interest to the contemporary modelers of Soviet economic reform was NEP's effort to combine private ownership in agriculture, private retail trade, and state ownership of the so-called commanding heights of industry and transportation. Recently Gorbachev rehabilitated Bukharin, the chief advocate of a mixed NEP-type economy, particularly in agriculture and trade. The successes of the Chinese experiment with market forces in agriculture, likewise, are known by the Soviets, and changes in resource- allocation arrangements are a logical feature of the general reform package. This research will reexamine the NEP economy. It will provide estimates of Soviet economic growth during the NEP period which, it is hoped, will resolve the controversy in the literature over the extent of the recovery of the Soviet economy on the eve of the first five year plan. A second task will be the development of econometric models of peasant marketing behavior during the 1920's - a key issue of the collectivization debate of that time. Regional and time series data will be used to estimate the effects of relative prices and taxes on peasant marketings of various agriculture products. The most time-consuming and difficult part of the projected research will be the data gathering stage. On the one hand, there is almost too much data available, both Tsarist and Soviet. On the other hand, each data set has its flaws. Improvement of our understanding of the various data sources and the quality of estimates based thereon is a primary goal of the study.
