The Global Manufacturer in Local Contexts: Power Engineering and Manufacturing Survival in the Former USSR

Western accounts of the industrial infrastructure of the former USSR have been frequently couched in terms of outmoded product design, particularly in the consumer goods sector; technological backwardness in processes and procedures, which can give rise to quality problems and environmental catastrophe; and difficulties in the assimilation of Western technologies. In the recent conditions of a transition economy, output has fallen to crisis levels partly because of high inflation, but also because fragmentation of the former Soviet Union has led to difficulties in access to markets and supplies. Furthermore, the size and vertically integrated structures of many factories in the region, previously developed in the central planning system to gain economies of scale and to assure continuities of supply, are now regarded as inflexible and inefficient for a privatised system of supply. These technological and structural conditions consequently give rise to concerns over the future lack of international competitiveness of industrial organisations in the former USSR and their associated effects on output and employment, with consequent effects on restrictions of access to welfare facilities in the region's transition economy.