Gorbachev's Economic Reforms: A Structural or a Technical Alteration?: Perestroika and Glasnost

The Eastern and Western worlds are diametrically opposed to each other not only politically and militarily but also economically and socially. In the socialist lands the communist one‐party system is dominant; in the West it is political pluralism, in Comecon the planned economy prevails, and in the Common Market and the USA it is the market economy, of course, although not in the form it took in the nineteenth century. From a social point of view the Eastern bloc guarantees full employment at a lower standard of living, in the market economy the higher standard of living is accompanied by structural, cyclical unemployment. Each system claims to be superior to the other.