HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

478 I. S. KOROPECKYJallocation, consistent with the efficiency principle, would result in themaximization of output for the entire country within some intermediatetime.The efficiency of geographical distribution of investment will not beanalyzed for the prerevolutionary period because the tsarist governmentwas only marginally involved in investment in productive facilities;in any case, the necessary data are not available. However, onecan investigate whether the productivity of capital, or of combinedcapital and labor, was growing at a faster rate in other republics than inthe Ukraine during various periods of the Soviet regime.Selected measures of growth in productivity in industry and agricultureare presented in Table 4 (p. 493). Except for the first two estimatesof the productivity of capital, shown by the incremental capitaloutputratio and the marginal productivity of capital, all other estimatesare intended to show total factor productivity. These indicatorshave been derived either by dividing the rates of output growth by thegrowth rates of combined resources or by subtracting the latter fromthe former. Capital and labor coefficients have been obtained by theuse of some version of the Cobb-Douglas production function. Comparisonswere made between the Ukraine, the RSFSR, and Kazakhstan.The last two republics were included because of their relativelyheavy investment activity, primarily in the Asiatic RSFSR and northernKazakhstan (Table 2). 14 In cases where data for these two republicswere unavailable, the comparison was between the Ukraine andthe USSR as a whole.According to the evidence in this table, the growth of capitalproductivity in industry during the interwar period was higher in theUkraine than the average for the entire USSR. This situation alsoprevailed after World War II until the mid-1960s with respect to boththe entire USSR and the RSFSR. Toward the end of that period,according to Cohn and my estimates, productivity growth of industryin the Ukraine began to lag behind that of industry in the entire SovietUnion and the Russian republic. This decrease in the Ukraine wasrelatively steep, because Bond's data indicate that the Ukraine wasbehind the RSFSR for the entire 1960-1975 period. On the otherhand, productivity growth of agriculture in the Ukraine was greater14Between 1971 and 1975, for example, 29 percent of total USSR investment wasallocated to the Asiatic part of the RSFSR and to Central Asia, with 56 percent ofthis sum going to the former, 22 percent to Kazakhstan, and 22 percent to theremaining four Central Asian republics (Schroeder, 1978, pp. 133-34).