What is the difference between the Yugoslav economic system and the participatory economy?
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I’m not an expert on the Yugoslav economic system. However, my understanding is that they used a mix of central planning and markets. Participatory economics is based around democratic planning, so the dynamic for how people decide what to make is totally different.
In central planning, the state makes plans based on information they collect. In democratic planning, producers and consumers are negotiating a plan together… there isn’t a state agency that edits plans or anything like that.
PS: Welcome to the forums!
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Thank you for your welcome! As far as I know, Yugoslavia’s economy is divided into two stages. In the early stage, Yugoslavia’ s workers’ autonomy can operate normally, and in the later stage, Yugoslavia’s factories are managed by managers. I saw a man who wrote a book about the participatory economy of the former Yugoslavia. His name is Jaroslav Vanek, wrote that book in 1971. Do you know him?
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Yeah, it seems like they valued trying to let the workplaces do their own thing.
It actually reminds me of what they tried to do in Chile with Project Cybersyn. It was essentially central planning, but they tried to let the workplaces do their own thing until the state deemed it was time to step in. They also tried to incorporate as much data as possible from the workplaces into the plans.
They never really got it working 100% though, and it’s debated how much they actually incorporated workers into the process.
I haven’t heard of Jaroslav Vanek, but after googling his books it seems he wrote about worker cooperatives a lot. That’s a little different from what people on this website propose. People didn’t start writing about the model on this website until the 1990s I believe.
Worker cooperatives play a part in the model on this website, but the key difference is that they are democratically planning the entire economy without markets or a state planning agency.
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Here’s a good paper on Yugoslavia: Sci-Hub | The feasibility of planned market systems: The Yugoslav visible hand and negotiated planning. Journal of Comparative Economics, 14(4), 768–790 | 10.1016/0147-5967(90)90052-b
It was quite different to the ParEcon model. It’s easy to tell because they never used the “annual planning procedure” characteristic of ParEcon.
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