These criticism come from my friend who is in the Cooperative Movement and in the Labour Land Campaign.
1. Most crucially they did not operate a social market in freehold land. By this I mean a system as in Hong Kong, where the state owns the freehold, and controls planning regulations. However it auctions leaseholds so that a market price is reached which takes into account the intensity of the economic activity in the area and yields more income to the state the higher the economic activity. The equivalent of annual ground rent is proportional to this market price and also goes to the state. This fund is then a resource for developing economic activity in the state according to a socially rational plan, and can redistribute it to counter lop-sided economic development.
2. Failure to make the cooperatives full cooperatives with responsibility for the managing of their assets and their capital. The result was that the cooperatives tended to redistribute surpluses they made rather than account fully for the capital they had received from the state. This made the enterprises less robust participants in the market and drained the capital resources of the state
3. Failure to have a currency board, so that when the state had a deficit it printed more money.
The last is the currency board debate. The first and second are perhaps more interesting since Yugoslavia had a measure of economic flexibility that the state centralised eastern European economies did not, but has still disintegrated.
Needless to say, under this thread title I am not seeking comments that it was all an imperialist conspiracy. I am asking for comments assuming there was an imperialist conspiracy, about whether the points above would have made Yugoslavia less vulnerable to it.
Chris Burford
London