Comecon to Try Market-Based Trade System

The Soviet-led economic bloc Comecon agreed today to move to a market-based system that would replace four decades of rigid central planning and barter trade, delegates said.

After a two-day session, prime ministers of the 10 Comecon nations decided to shift gradually toward trade based on convertible currency and world market prices, they said.

A special commission set up to draft changes to the Comecon statutes will make proposals next month and meet in Prague in mid-March to discuss them, Czechoslovak officials said.

Comecon, which is composed of the seven Warsaw Pact nations plus Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam, has until now decreed who exports what to whom and at what price. Its accounting has been done in “transferable rubles” which have no value outside the bloc.

The meeting was the first since a tide of changes swept through Eastern Europe late last year, loosening the Communist grip on power in the area and opening the way for Western-style democracy and economics.

“The political situation has changed sharply and there is broad unanimity among the European members that we have to move toward a market-type integration,” said Comecon Executive Committee Chairman Andrei Lukanov of Bulgaria.

Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister Georgi Pirinski told reporters the step-by-step move toward hard currency and world prices, first proposed last month by Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, would get under way in 1991.

“The transition has to be gradual to take into account balance of payments shifts and other negative aspects. . . . We are looking for a soft landing and not a hard landing,” he said.