Word: productive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...West and the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev asked his countrymen to push for scientific and technical excellence by applying socialist economic principles "in a creative way." Even within a planned economy, he said, there was room for "enhancing the independence of enterprises (and) raising their interest in the end product of their work." But Gorbachev also cautioned against letting the drive for greater material benefits disrupt "social justice," a signal that the Soviet Union, for all its economic difficulties, was not about to adopt the sort of incentive systems being introduced and practiced these days in Deng Xiaoping's China...
...same ideological cloth. Despite his relative youth, he has not openly identified with the aspirations of Soviet citizens under age 30, who now make up half the population. His speeches at home often ring with the same doctrinaire phraseology as those of his most orthodox Politburo colleagues. Totally a product of his party's system, Gorbachev flourished by avoiding risks, not by taking them...
...militancy has its roots in a January meeting in Los Angeles between President Reagan and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. They agreed on the need to open the Japanese market to American-made electronics, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, along with forest products and telecommunications goods and services. This sector--or industry-wide--approach was a sharp shift from the previous goal of trying to gain entry on a product- by-product basis, a narrowly focused tactic that was getting nowhere. Says one official: "As soon as we knock down one clay pigeon, another pops up. We have got to knock...
Most U.S. businessmen are convinced that the Japanese stack the trade deck outrageously against them. Chicago-based FMC sells soda ash, used in glassmaking and other processes, for $70 to $75 a ton in the U.S.; the product sells for $240 to $250 a ton in Japan. But FMC and other U.S. makers are allowed to supply only 200,000 of Japan's annual requirement of 1.4 million tons. Says FMC Chairman Robert H. Malott: "Soda ash is soda ash is soda ash. If that market were truly open, we would have...
Even in purely economic terms, the prospect that the new General Secretary faces is daunting. Growth in national income, the closest Soviet equivalent to gross national product, was a respectable but disappointing 2.6% last year (in contrast to a GNP rise of 6.9% in the U.S.). That figure was down from 3.1% in 1983 and only about half the size of gains registered in the 1960s. Worse yet, the growth rate overstates how well the economy provides the things Soviet citizens want and need: personal consumption of goods and services per capita in the Soviet Union is less than...