CENTRAL PLANNING: A system of extensive central government control of an economy, including organizing production and making allocation decisions. This was the popular method of allocating resources and answering the three basic questions of allocation under the communism/socialism economic systems of the Soviet Union, China, and others during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Applying the communist/socialist philosophy that private property and market allocation were "bad," central planning relied on extremely detailed plans made by government. These plans would set specific production quotas for individual products, parts, components, and inputs fabricated by all of the factories and farms across the economy. This was a daunting, complex task that required detailed production information for hundreds of thousands of different commodities.

     See also | government | government sector | economy | production | allocation | resources | three questions of allocation | communism | socialism | private property | market | information | capitalism | free enterprise |

CENTRAL PLANNING, AmosWEB GLOSS*arama, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: July 8, 2025].

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A principle of short-run production stating that as a firm combines more of a variable input with a fixed input, the marginal product of the variable input eventually declines. This is THE economic principle underlying the analysis of short-run production for a firm. It offers an explanation for the law of supply and the positive slope of the market supply curve.

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