The study examines the evolving political priorities of the communist party leadership in the context of the Marxist theoretical framework; the challenges of the Civil War; foreign intervention and the 1941 invasion; post-war reconstruction; and the attempt to gain military and economic parity with the USA.
At each point, Kaser describes how the internal dialogue between enterprises, consumers and the state apparatus influenced the strategies adopted for economic growth and agricultural and industrial development.
Kaser highlights the contributions made to the internal debate by N. I. Bukharin, G. V. Plekhanov, E. A. Preobrazhensky, N D Kondratiev, A V Chayanov, V. G. Groman, L. V. Kantorovich, Y. G. Liberman, G. A. Feldman, V. V. Novozhilov, Branko Horvat and A. G. Aganbegyan.
The book covers the context and options for economic reform in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.
The study includes extracts and summaries of the CMEA charter and principles, its internal organisation and procedures and its approach towards pricing, technical co-operation, investment and integration based upon specialisation and the division of labour within the socialist bloc.
Kaser highlights the difficulty facing an economy planned on a national basis has in integrating trading relations and foreign direct investment without devolving decision-making to enterprises and without establishing a clearing mechanism for transactions or introducing currency convertibility.
His father Charles Kaser (1898–1983) was a French-speaking Swiss who settled in Britain as a banker and married an English woman Mabel (1891–1976), who had served on the staff of the UK Delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.
An early facility in the English and French languages was stimulated at home and by his Catholic influenced political interests, to the extent that he learnt Serbo-Croat to attend a youth conference in Zagreb and Belgrade in 1946, where he was one of the few non-communist speakers called to the podium.
He held short- and long-term Visiting Lectureships and Professorships in the UK, Europe (Europa Institute, Amsterdam) and the United States (Universities of Michigan and Stanford).
Government service over some forty years included frequent requests for consultancies from Ministries and from the House of Commons and in the mid-1980s briefing sessions for the Prime Minister.
He undertook work for many international organisations – several UN agencies, the European Commission, the IMF, EBRD and NATO – and industry, including Consolidated Gold Fields and the oil and gas companies ENI and Shell, and wrote regularly for The Economist Intelligence Unit and “The Annual Register”.