HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MOSCOW-UKRAINE ECONOMIC RELATIONS 477gross industrial output, and, during the last two decades, for netmaterial product in per capita terms are shown in Table 3 (p. 492).These indicators span the period from the year just before WorldWar I to 1979, and the underlying data refer to comparable politicalunits, the present-day fifteen union republics. The coefficients are lowby world standards. Their further decrease between 1913 and 1940confirms the previous finding of a reduction in inequality during theinterwar period. This decline continued through World War II and theimmediate postwar decade. Since about 1960, a change in the directionof the trend can be observed, particularly in such a comprehensiveindicator as net material product. Inequality widened especially betweenEuropean republics as a whole, including the entire RussianFederation, on the one hand, and the combined Transcaucasian andCentral Asian republics, on the other. The net material product percapita of the latter, the less developed republics, decreased in relationto the former, the more developed republics — from 81.3 to 60.0percent between 1960 and 1979. Part of this decline must be attributedto rapid population growth in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia.The same slight increase toward inequality has been found in athorough study of the interrepublic distribution of personal and collectiveincome of state employees and of members of collective farmsbetween 1960 and 1970 (McAuley, 1979, pp. 111-13, 130, 140-41). 13In general, the ranking of union republics with respect to level ofeconomic development has remained largely unchanged during theSoviet period: the Ukraine's income per capita has been close to theUSSR average, preceded by that of the Baltic, the Russian, andrecently also the Belorussian republics, and followed by the Moldavian,the Transcaucasian, and finally the Central Asian republics.One can assume, then, that during the interwar period and immediatelyafter World War II, Ukrainian funds helped to an unspecifieddegree to develop industry in the less developed republics. In view ofthe fact that the equalization trend reversed itself during the 1960s and1970s but the transfer of a portion of Ukrainian national incomecontinued, the question arises whether the bulk of these funds wasused for investment in regions which were relatively more developedbut in which productivity was growing faster than in the Ukraine. Such13This reversal in the equalization trend at higher levels of income seems tocontradict the hypothesis put forth by some Western economists (Cohn, 1977,pp. 78-79) who attempted to apply the pattern established by Williamson formarket economies to the Soviet economy.