Word: planecon
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...control by offering a Communist version of a consumer society while stifling opposition with one of the most efficient police states in the Soviet bloc. Czechoslovakia's relative prosperity, however, has been bought at a punishing price: by starving industry of needed investment for modernization. Notes a report by PlanEcon, a Washington-based business consulting firm specializing in Eastern Europe: "The leadership is driving the economy systematically in the direction of long-term stagnation...
...Soviet economy: "Soviet workers think that robots work too fast, and sabotage them. Supervisors have to build fences around the robots." Managers fear that testing new technologies will disrupt production and thereby prevent their factories from fulfilling assigned quotas. Says Herbert Levine, an expert on the Soviet economy at PlanEcon, a Washington consulting group: "All technological change means risk and a measurably high percentage of failure. Bureaucracies do not tolerate failure well...