Measuring inflation in the soviet machinebuilding sector, 1960–1973

This article examines the behavior of machinery wholesale prices in the Soviet Union during the 1960–1973 period. Many Western experts hypothesize that Soviet enterprises escape fixed prices by making cosmetic changes in established products in order to raise their prices—the so-called new-product-pricing phenomenon. The hedonic technique—the use of regression analysis to examine the connection between price change and quality improvements in machinery items—is used in the study to test for the presence of this phenomenon and to determine what impact, if any, it had on machinery price levels over the period studied.