Economics, Institute of

(full name, Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), a scientific institution that deals with fundamental problems of the political economy of socialism. The institute was organized in Moscow in 1930 from the economics section of the Communist Academy. Since 1936, it has been subordinate to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

As of 1978, the Institute of Economics had six departments, specializing in the following: general problems of the political economy of socialism; theoretical problems of the material and technical basis for communism and of scientific and technological progress; socialist reproduction; agrarian problems of socialism; the generalization of experience in Soviet economics and the history of the development of Soviet economic thought; and planning, coordination, and information. The institute also had a laboratory for the theoretical study of the planned management of the national economy, a general Academic Council, five academic councils for special problems, and three specialized councils for awarding the academic degrees of doctor of sciences and candidate of sciences.

The Institute of Economics helps draft five-year plans and long-range plans for the development of the national economy. It investigates theoretical problems pertaining to the improvement of planning techniques, planned pricing, and the management of the national economy, as well as problems of increasing the economic efficiency of social production, accelerating technological progress, and raising the efficiency of agricultural production. The institute generalizes the experience of economic policy and the development of economic thought in the USSR and in other socialist countries; it also prepares critiques of bourgeois and revisionist concepts of socialism.

The institute has a library. Graduate degrees are awarded for full-time study at the institute or for correspondence study. Since 1950, the institute has been a center for the coordination of economic research.

The Institute of Economics has its own press organ, the monthly journal Voprosy ekonomiki (Problems of Economics). The institute maintains broad scholarly relations with economic institutions in other countries.