Planned Economies

Central planning in practice: collectivization, nationalization, rationing and shortages, and the reforms attempted when the planned economy failed.

• Cuba's Healthcare: The Showcase and the Evidence

  Cuba's doctors and infant mortality figures are the regime's pride. What researchers, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch have found behind them.

• Who Owns North Korea? Property, Rations and Control

  How North Korea's state took the land, the factories and the food supply — and fought the markets that grew up after the famine of the 1990s.

• China's Hukou System: How the Party Tied Peasants to the Land

  Since 1958 China's household registration system has bound people to their birthplace, splitting citizens into urban and rural castes.

• Cuba's Special Period: The Crisis After the Soviet Collapse

  When Soviet support vanished, Cuba's economy shrank by a third and daily calories fell from 2,899 to 1,863: the 'Special Period' of the 1990s.

• The Great Chinese Famine, 1959–61: Mao's Great Leap Disaster

  How Mao's Great Leap Forward — communes, impossible grain targets, procurement and exports — caused the largest famine in history, killing 30–45 million.

• Hunger for Export: Food Rationing in Ceaușescu's Romania

  How Ceaușescu's drive to repay Romania's foreign debt brought ration cards, unheated flats and empty shops in the 1980s, until the regime fell in 1989.

• Yugoslav Market Socialism: The Third Way That Failed

  Tito's self-management promised a middle way between capitalism and Soviet planning. It ended in foreign debt, mass emigration and 2,000% inflation.

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