The Stages of Economic Evolution and the Russian/USSR/Russian Experience

Abstract

Demonstrates the relevance of a stages methodology as a basis for understanding and analysing the evolutionary metamorphosis leading to the current Russian malaise. Addresses the advantages and disadvantages of the methodology, such as the unilinear fallacy, and analyses economic stagnation and decline in the context of the dynamics of culture evolution in the stage of modern economic growth. Given the Kuznetsian emphasis on a science‐fed technology, how then to explain the lack of Russian permeability to that technological flow? Many variables, such as excessive military spending, nationalism, rigid centralization, ideology, and so on, enter into such an analytical purview. It appears that neither tsarist nor Soviet Russia was able to create a culture adequately permeable to the dynamics of an ongoing science‐fed technological flow. The basic problem for Russia to overcome today is one of a cultural lag. A greater democratization of social and economic organization, concomitant with the needs of a modern industrial society, appears in order.

Citation

Brinkman, R.L. and Bovt, G. (1994), "The Stages of Economic Evolution and the Russian/USSR/Russian Experience", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 21 No. 5/6, pp. 33-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068299410054586