Self-management: economic theory and Yugoslav practice (Broché)

The subject of self-management — of companies in which the decisions are made by the work force rather than by the managers or owners — has long been of interest both to economists and to a wider audience. In this 1984 book Saul Estrin offers a comprehensive survey- of how workers' self-management has influenced industrial structure and the allocation of resources in Yugoslavia, where a system of this type has operated since the 1950s.
The study has two parts, devoted respectively- to deducing, and to examining empirically, hypotheses about the operation of the Yugoslav economy. In the first, Dr Estrin highlights observable economic phenomena which could be attributed to self-management rather than any other clement of the complex Yugoslav environment. He concludes that labour, market forces will necessarily he weak under self management, which will lead to wide income differentials and misallocation of labour.
The empirical section establishes that the Yugoslav pattern of income distribution anti economic development did alter significantly at the time that effective sell-management was introduced, and in the manner predicted by the theory. The non-competitiveness of Yugoslav markets makes the role of monopoly power as a source of allocative problems a recurrent theatre of the study. Dr Estrin tests his arguments formally by using an eeonomcu-ic nutdel in which wage equations are derived as the reduced form of enterprise choice equations.
The book will interest economists concerted with the likely impact of workers' participation as well as specialists in self-managementt theory and the operation of the Yugoslav economy.