How many annual plannung procedures should there be?

Questions
1

Hej! I’m new to this forum. I’m currently reading “A Participatory Economy” by Robin Hahnel, and have some basic questions or ideas…

Should there be an annual planning procedure for each level of consumer federation (neighborhood, city, state, …), or just one for the highest available level (nation, continent)?

I.e. separate IFBs for city-level planning, state-level planning and so on. This wasn’t entirely clear for me from the book.

It feels to me like there should be separate planning procedures for e.g. the city and nation level: Because a quarrel (i.e. a slow convergence of prices) over the supply of hairdresser-hours in Berlin shouldn’t affect planning in Leipzig. Geographically separating planning procedures might make the system more robust against destabilizing actors (people malevolently trying to prevent planning convergence).

2

This is why there must be one annual planning procedure:

  1. One thing the annual planning procedure DOES is generate estimates of the opportunity costs of using all the different categories of labor, natural resources, and stocks of produced “capital goods” available. This is important for knowing where, and by whom they can be used most productively. Since these “means of production” could all be used to produce anything, ANYWHERE in the national economy, they can only be estimated through a unified, annual participatory planning procedure for the country as a whole. They cannot be estimated separately, through planning procedures for only one region or part of the national economy.

  2. This does not mean that the estimates of the opportunity cost of using something… for example, an acre of land with a certain amount of top soil, and a certain amount of annual rainfall… will be the same no matter where the acre is located. In one part of the country it might have a higher opportunity cost when used than it does in another part of the country. But fortunately, our annual planning procedure will handle this well, and provide slightly different estimates of the opportunity cost of using such an acre in the two different places.