Learning to Show and Tell Capitalist Style

Review By Neil Robinson

Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick

Mirrors of the Economy: National Accounts and International Norms in Russia and Beyond. ByYoshiko M. Herrera. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 252 pp., $49.95 hardcover(ISBN 978-08014-4585-9).

The collapse of the Soviet Union also saw the end of the particularly Sovietmethod of national economic accounting. The USSR did not account for itsnational economic development through the system of national accounts (SNA),the procedure for generating statistical pictures of national economic wealth anddevelopment standard in advanced liberal capitalist economies that we take forgranted as the means of measuring economic activity. The USSR used the mate-rial product system (MPS) and its satellite states followed suit. MPS covered a dif-ferent range of economic activity to SNA, divided the economy up into differentsectors, and had a different headline statistics: where SNA calculates grossdomestic product and its components, MPS was concerned with ‘‘net materialproduct,’’ roughly the volume of what was produced, and the balances betweeneconomic sectors.

The differences between the two systems of national accounting meant thatmoving from MPS to SNA after the end of communism was a major change bothin how statistics were gathered, the use that they could be put to, and the opera-tion and political importance of Goskomstat, the state statistical agency. Suchdeep-seated and far-reaching change is not usually easy to bring about since itinvolves tackling vested interests, encounters bureaucratic resistance, and, ofcourse, gets caught up in the logistical and operational snares that beset anyreform initiative. However, this was not the case with the changeover to SNA inRussia as Yoshiko Herrera’s book shows. Perhaps uniquely in the annals of post-Soviet reform, the change in national accounting systems was relatively smooth.Why this was, and what this tells us about policy change generally, are the mainthemes of Herrera’s book, Mirrors of the Economy: National Accounts and Interna-tional Norms in Russia and Beyond. The adoption of SNA to replace MPS alsohas wider implications, as Herrera points out. The adoption of SNA in the post-socialist world was a major advance in the ongoing struggle to standardizenational accounts since MPS was the major alternative to SNA globally. In turn,this standardization helped further globalization since more uniformity instatistical reporting assisted the development of transnational economic flows.

The broader implications of Herrera’s study of the adoption of SNA in Russiamake her book an addition to literatures on the transfer of international normsand institutional adaptation, as well as to that on economic reform in Russia.Herrera explains the way that SNA became the dominant means of drawing upnational accounts and shows how constructivist approaches to the formation ofan international institution fruitfully capture the interplay between internationalnorms and conceptions of national interest. Herrera’s argument is that struc-tural, institutional, and social arguments are not sufficient to explain the Russianadoption of SNA in comparative context. These arguments are dealt with in aseries of chapters which show the importance of structural, institutional, andsocio-political conditions, but also that they are not on their own sufficient toexplain change or its scale. Structural arguments—that Russia had to adopt SNA

Robinson, Neil. (2012) Learning to Show and Tell Capitalist Style. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2012.01089.x� 2012 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2012) 14, 185–186

because of economic reform and ⁄ or pressure from international agencies—donot explain why Russia adopted SNA more fully than some other countries sub-ject to similar reforms and pressures. No social force had the power or the orga-nization to force the change on Goskomstat, and when SNA was adopted, theRussian government was too disorganized, and Goskomstat too independent, forsimple political factors to account for the changes made.

Herrera accounts for the adoption of SNA by developing constructivist argu-ments in what she says is a new direction, seeing the adoption of SNA as an out-come of changes in what she calls ‘‘conditional norms.’’ Conditional norms arenorms that only work to prescribe behavior under certain conditions. Whenthese conditions change, so do norms, even if other identities, institutions, andinterests remain the same. In the case of national accounting practice change inRussia, Goskomstat officials did not change their minds about MPS as a result ofa change in their group identity or interest, or because they changed theirnorms slowly over time in the way that norms and ideas about policy shift over-time in a liberal polity to a point where the sum of small changes leads to a para-digm shift. Instead, the paradigm shift was built into their thinking: the ‘‘type ofeconomy’’ was ‘‘a condition of the appropriateness of the national accountingsystem’’ (p. 172). Soviet statisticians had already conditionally accepted that SNAwas legitimate and appropriate for capitalist economies long before the collapseof the Soviet economy. It was thus natural for statisticians that when the econ-omy changed the method of constructing the national accounts changed too,independently of their organizational and personal interests and identities.

Herrera’s book is novel. There is no other study of the move from commu-nism in postcommunism that attempts to relate global to very particular changesin the way that her book does. Conceptually, the idea of conditional norms thatHerrera advances is an important reminder that there were alternative ideasabout social organization lodged in the way that Soviet policy and intellectualelites thought about ‘‘really existing socialism’’ and its norms. How much moreutility the idea of conditional norms has is hard to judge. My suspicion is thatconditional norms may be difficult to define in other areas. Outside the rela-tively ordered world of statistical agencies, what constitutes conditional normsmight be much fuzzier and changes in conditions that sustain norms more con-tested. Yet even if this is the case, Herrera’s detailed study has thrown much lighton the reform of one part of the Russian state and the conditions that influ-enced its success. Her book is essential reading for anyone interested in Russiaor the spread of norms internationally.

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