Central Management of the Comprehensive Experiment
The author, when assessing the course of the Comprehensive Experiment of Increased Independence and Responsibility of the Economic Organizations for Effective Development, proceed from its understanding as an indispensable part of the comprehensive rebuilding of the economic mechanism, as it enables to test the preparedness of the central bodies for their new functions.
The activities of the central bodies when implementing the experiment can be divided into four stages. In the first stage there were prepared the principles of the experiment and two production economic units were chosen to test them. In the second stage 10 production economic units and two enterprises were engaged in the third stage altogether 22 organizations participated (13 production economic units and 9 enterprises) and in the fourth stage there were already 60 organizations in the experiment (25 production economic units, 34 enterprises and 1 research institute).
The interest of the economic organizations was objectively conditioned by the problems of their economic position and development within the framework of the present system of planned management. In various stages there, however, prevailed various factors that influence the behaviour of the organizations and are determined by just this position. At the same time the ability of the center to regulate this interest was changing. The realization of the experiment in a particular organization was conditioned by a consent from the respective ministry, by a discussion of the issue in the Management Commission and by a recommendations from the national or federal government.
In the beginning those organizations that were striving to enforce the new economic conditions did enter the experiment, but later they were also joined by those that felt threatened by the new economic conditions. The following activization of the central bodies lead to the improvement of the organizational and economic structure of the organizations participating in the experiment, but at the cost of differentiation of the economic tools, what made the results of the experimenting organizations simply uncomparable. Therefore the second part is devoted to the issues of assessment of the central management of the experiment and its tools
Full Czech Version publ. In Politická ekonomie, 36, 1988, No 7, p. 725-738.