BETWEEN the middle of I956 and the end of I957, a revolutionary change occurred in the public availability of statistical and related information on the Soviet economy. As recently as the beginning of I956, such a basic datum as the total population of the Soviet Union was unavailable from any official Soviet source and had to be estimated by foreign students. The situation was similar with respect to many other fundamental data which are normally freely and easily available for other highly developed modern industrial societies. Over the past decade and a half, uncounted manyears of hard and frustrating labor have had to be devoted by students of the Soviet economy to the difficult task of trying to estimate the basic parameters of that economy as the prerequisite for intelligent analysis. Now the situation has changed dramatically for the better, though it would be premature to say that all problems in this field have been or soon will be ended. As for so many other recent changes in the Soviet Union, the signal for the shift away from a policy of nearly complete statistical secrecy was given at the 2oth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in February I956. The signal was given in the speech of Communist party leader Anastas I. Mikoyan who declared: 1

Journal Article Taxation and Incentive in Mobilization: Comment Get access Harry S. Schwartz Harry S. Schwartz San Francisco, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 66, Issue 4, November 1952, Pages 600–605, https://doi.org/10.2307/1882110 Published: 01 November 1952

Richard W. Baker, Jr., Leon T. Kendall, Walter C. Nelson, J. Charles Partee, David Fritz, Harry S. Schwartz, Changing Character of the Real Estate Mortgage Markets: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 19, No. 2, Part 1: Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, Boston, Massachusetts, December 27-29, 1963 (May, 1964), pp. 321-333