Suchergebnisse

This book is a collection of seven papers originally given at the 1989 meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. The authors come from the fields of economics, history, and political science and are all specialists in the field of Soviet and East European agriculture. The first essay, by David Macey, assesses Gorbachev's agricultural reform in light of the experience of the Stolypin reforms at the beginning of the century. The essays by Jim Butterfield and Ed Cook examine the impediments to successful reform from the perspective of a political scientist and an economist. Karen Brooks and Don Van Atta concentrate their attention on the efforts to introduce lease contracting into agriculture. D.Gale Johnson's essay examines the economic effects of trade liberalization in agriculture. The final paper, by Michael Marrese, suggests that there are lessons for the Soviet Union to be learned from the Hungarian experience, namely, that the changes in agriculture must be comprehensive and that the party can win over popular support if its agricultural policies succeed.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 The Soviet Economy Under Gorbachev -- Chapter 2 The Shortage Economy -- Chapter 3 Prices, Income, and the Falling Standard of Living -- Chapter 4 Unemployment -- Chapter 5 Strikes and the New Labor Militancy -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

AbstractWhen famine overwhelmed ?ve North China provinces in 1920, one of the ways that funds were raised to combat the disaster was through the sale of "cinderella" stamps, stamps that could not be used as legal postage but rather could be pasted onto envelopes or packages as decorations. There were two such efforts during the 1920s and both mainly sold their stamps in the United States. The first fundraising drive was organized by the American Committee for the China Famine Relief Fund which sold a 3-cent stamp, the announced cost of feeding one Chinese person for one day. This effort raised nearly $4.4 million and ceased operations in early June 1921 after only about three months of activity. The second campaign, organized by the China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC), was considerably less successful in raising money. It issued a wider variety of stamps, probably between 1923 and 1929 and in 1924, the CIFRC even established a special department to coordinate the sale of stamps in China and the United States, mostly during the Christmas and New Year's season. Sales were uneven and always low; even in years where there were profits, they were trivial. The sale of these stamps ceased at the end of the decade.