Eugenia B. Belova
Whirl of Planning: Gosplan-Ministries Relations in the 1930s,
in: Ekonomicheskaja istorija. Ezhegodnik (Economic Hystory. Yearbook). 2001, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002, p.579-606.

Summary
The main subject of this paper are the relationships between the planners and economic agents of the Soviet economy in the formative years of centralized planning, the first half of the 1930's. The study is based on archival documents, showing the process of development and implementation of short-term plans by the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and economic ministries. The source material is analyzed in the framework of the economics of information focusing on the principal-agent problem. The findings of this study shed light on the impact of information search and exchange problems on the methods and policies of central planning. Besides that, an analysis on the behavior of economic agents revealed their preference for uncontrolled decision-making that was not anticipated by the planners.

---