As the experience of economic cooperation among COMECON member-countries shows, the coordination of plans must be aimed at implementing the following interrelated objective development principles of the international socialist division of labor:
– proper consideration for the objectively necessary scope of economic development in each country and the socialist world system as a whole, which contributes to balancing each country’s economy;
– securing a high economic advantage for the international socialist division of labor, as expressed by rapid growth in production and by the greatest possible satisfaction of the needs of the population in each country, while expending a minimum of societal effort;
– securing the connection between international specialization in production and the complex (multilateral) development of the economies of individual socialist countries in the interest of the fullest and most expedient utilization of the natural and economic conditions of production, including workforce reserves;
– gradually overcoming historically determined differences in levels of economic development in individual countries, especially by industrializing the countries with relatively low levels of economic development on the basis of maximal use of the internal potential of each country and the advantages of the socialist world system.
A steady increase in the effectiveness of the coordination presupposes that it:
– is carried out both bilaterally and multilaterally. This takes into account that the significance of multilateral coordination will increase in the future;
– deals primarily with prospective plans, which allows for necessary changes in structure, in production technology, etc., in the interest of intensifying and improving the international socialist division of labor;
– is implemented by the individual countries as they draw up their respective plans;
– provides for measures that assure that coordinated obligations will be satisfied with respect to volume and deadlines for reciprocal deliveries, the quality and technological level of the products to be delivered or of the countries;
– provides for joint measures in a number of countries for resolving major economic and technical questions.
[ . . . ]
Source: Europa-Archiv, Series 15/1962, p. D 381 ff; reprinted in Curt Gasteyger, Europa zwischen Spaltung und Einigung 1945 bis 1993. Darstellung und Dokumentation [Europe between Division and Unification]. Bonn, 1994, pp. 214-19.
Translation: Allison Brown
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