The agricultural surplus hypothesis

In the July 1970 issue of this journal, I suggested that the prevailing Western conception of the role of agriculture in Soviet rapid development rests upon inadequate theoretical and empirical foundations and :may therefore be quite wrong. Professor Alec Nove's defence of the prevailing view in the January 197I issue clarifies his position and thereby highlights our differences. I shall address my reply to three main issues: I) the measurement of the net contribution of agriculture during rapid industrialization, 2) the analytic usefulness of the concept of an agricultural 'surplus' and 3) the evaluation of mass collectivization. In my article I argued that the net surplus of an agricultural sector cannot be measured unambiguously. Professor Nove claims that the 'net agricultural surplus' cannot be measured at all in the Soviet case (pp. 398-9), which is a very different kind of assertion. What I meant -was that, because a measure like the net surplus is sensitive to the price weights used to compute it, the size and/or the sign of the net product flow between agriculture and non-agriculture may differ for each set of price relatives selected. This in no way means that measurement is impossible, and the net surplus of agriculture as I defined it is certainly measurable. In fact, a Soviet economic historian, A. A. Barsov, has recently attempted to measure the net agricultural surplus for 1928-32 (inclusive) on the basis of previously unexploited archival data and other more familiar sources

Agricultural economics · Agriculture · Archaeology · Economics · Geography · Mathematical economics · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History

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