The Czechoslovak Attempts to Improve the System of Management in the 1980s

In 1969 the new leadership under Husak started to dismantle the system of management introduced in 1966–68 and replace it with the old, centralised system. In the beginning of the 1970s the economic situation improved: the rate of increase in national income grew, primarily due to faster growth in agriculture, the rate of inflation was substantially reduced, and the domestic market was better supplied with consumer goods. As a result, the political leaders were not very concerned with changes in the management system. In the middle of the 1970s, when the economic situation started to deteriorate, systemic problems again came to the forefront. In connection with the VIth Five-year Plan for 1976–80 the government came up with some provisions for the ‘improvement of the system of planned management’, which were nothing other than some minor changes in the system of success indicators, improvement in planning the targets in science and technology, incentives for exports, and so on (see Hůla, 1976; Lér, 1980). Apparently the changes did not have the expected effects, and since, at the same time, the economy experienced further deterioration, the government decided in 1978 to start experiments with some new provisions whose main objective was to promote economic efficiency and quality.