The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into its subcomponents – namely, capital and labour efficiency. I find that the Soviet Union registered strong labour efficiency gains during most of the postwar period, converging towards the labour efficiency level of the global frontier – the US. Labour efficiency growth did decrease over time, but labour efficiency was not a primary cause of Soviet growth retardation. That retardation was instead caused by a decline in capital efficiency. At a disaggregated level, I find that the decrease in capital efficiency was driven by structures. I hypothesize that labour shortages and an inadequate investment policy resulted in a large stock of unfinished, and hence idle, structures, distorting Soviet economic growth.

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从长期角度看技术变革和战后苏联经济增长放缓，1885-2019

现有的研究通常发现技术变革对于制约苏联的经济增长非常重要。虽然这些研究在量化技术变革的程度方面取得了成功，但在量化技术变革的性质方面却不太成功。本文通过将总体技术变革分解为其子组成部分（即资本效率和劳动力效率），向探讨苏联效率的本质又迈进了一步。我发现，苏联在战后的大部分时间里，劳动效率都取得了强劲的增长，正在向全球前沿——美国的劳动效率水平靠拢。劳动效率的增长确实随着时间的推移而下降，但劳动效率并不是苏联经济增长迟缓的主要原因。这种滞后实际上是由资本效率下降造成的。从分类层面来看，我发现资本效率的下降是由结构驱动的。我假设劳动力短缺和投资政策不足导致大量未完工的闲置结构，扭曲了苏联的经济增长。