Havana Cuba. – The Cuban economy, since 1959, has lacked a defined strategy for its development. The country has gone from one lurch to another in the midst of a plot of “correcting errors.” What is convenient today, tomorrow is not; and what was once discarded can later be resumed. Price formation has not been exempt from such irregularities.
The mechanism generally used by the heads of the Castro economy for the formation of centralized prices has been the cost method. It consists of preparing a cost sheet, in which the producer or provider of a service incorporates all the costs incurred (raw materials, wages paid, indirect expenses, etc.) to achieve a unit of finished product or service. borrowed. A profit margin is added to that production cost, and the company price is ready.
However, once the machinery of power realized the need to produce efficiently, around the time of the end of the famous “Soviet pipeline” in the 1990s, talk began about the inconvenience of the production method. costs for that purpose.
Because that method of price formation accommodated companies, and did not encourage them to be efficient. Entities could spend more raw materials than planned, pay undue wages, exceed electricity and fuel costs; and all this was supported by the cost sheets that they themselves had prepared.
The economy, for its part, received more expensive products, almost always of poor quality, and of course very uncompetitive beyond national borders.
It was then that they began to experiment with other methods of price formation, one of which turned out to be going to similar products. That is to say, the price of a foreign product that presented a use value similar or similar to the national one was taken, and the latter was set a price that kept a certain correspondence with the foreign product.
This system forced the national company to be efficient and reduce its production costs in order to obtain some profit margin in its productive management.
But, the Sorting Task, and with it an inflation that exceeded the forecasts of Mr. Marino Murillo and his work team. From that moment on, none of the therapies applied by Castroism has been able to stop the escalation of prices.
It is in this context that some attempts have appeared to retake cost tokens as a miracle cure against inflation. On April 21, the newspaper Granma He referred to a strategy adopted in the province of Las Tunas, which consists of the application of cost cards that prevent the establishment of what they call “speculative prices”.
After acknowledging that the measures applied so far, such as the price cap, have not had the expected effect, the writer resorts to an expression of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero: “It is necessary to do things differently.”
Going back to cost tokens for pricing is, among other things, a very likely foray into the mistakes of the past. You may be able to discourage someone from overpricing, but you are losing the battle for business efficiency. As we say in good Cuban: we would leave Guatemala to enter Guatapeor.
OPINION ARTICLE
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