subjective constructions."" S. M. Yampolskiy also 

 concludes that the calculation of economic return has 

 been made mandatory, in effect, only for projects of 

 major importance approved by the USSR Council of Min- 

 isters or for special bonus projects in which an en- 

 terprise assimilates a technology new to the USSR. 78 



Even for the highest priority basic S&T problems, 

 however, economic analysis has limitations and defi- 

 ciencies. Among the current 200 basic problems eco- 

 nomic return was not determined in a number of cases, 

 nor were the technical level charts always complete 

 and accurate. In some instances, information was 

 lacking on important indicators. Analogies were some- 

 times used and not the latest achievements in compar- 

 ing technological merit. As a GKNT official notes, 

 "All this prevented the conduct of careful analysis 

 and expert review for all the problems. It is neces- 

 sary to give more attention to analysis and evalua- 

 tion of new technology, to make more precise the in- 

 formation on the technical level charts. "79 



Studies by Soviet science policy specialists in 

 the early 1970s exposed a number of analytical and 

 methodological deficiencies in the handling of this 

 special class of decision problems. Commenting on 

 the experience of cost overruns — sometimes quite stag- 

 gering — among the 246 basic S&T problems during the 

 Eighth Five Year Plan, Kosov and Popov concluded that 

 "cost" was not, in fact, substantiated in the system 

 of coordination plans for these problems. No relia- 

 ble or universal methodology was used in calculating 

 the cost of either individual projects or programs 

 as a whole. Nor was there any consistent effort to 

 relate cost to economic return. Economic return was 

 not an important or obligatory object of planning. 

 There was also some duplication among the problems so 

 that parallel programs existed, for example, on de- 

 veloping new kinds of paper, new types of irrigation 

 systems for agriculture, and data processing systems 

 for handling S&T information. 80 Other specialists, 

 including 0. I. Volkov, Boris Zaitsev, and Boris La- 

 pin, also conclude that the coordination plans for 

 1966-1970 were deficient in "economic effective- 

 ness."" 1 For the most part, the methods of planning 



122 



