Prospects for the Soviet economy to the year 2000

This article reviews the current state of the Soviet economy, and, after placing it within the broader context of the world economy, provides a number of alternative projections of its future course up to the year 2000. For this purpose an updated structural matrix of the Soviet economy was incorporated into a global structure of the world economy built for the United Nations and described in Leontief, Carter and Petri (The Future of the World Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Several important modifications in the structural formulation of the model were carried out in order to account for the projected increased production and export of Soviet natural gas to the end of the century and to incorporate current estimates of Soviet agricultural and military-goods production.