Western Experts Urge Rapid Soviet Reforms : Study: A review of Soviet restructuring by leading Western institutions says some pain is necessary.

Four leading Western economic institutions said today that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev must accelerate the pace of reform in his country or run the risk that the effort could fail.

The long-awaited study, the most comprehensive look yet by the West at the crumbling Soviet economy, called for economic pain in the form of wage controls imposed on workers at the same time price controls are removed from a variety of goods.

It said such bitter medicine was the only way to stabilize the chaotic situation in the Soviet Union, where consumers in major cities are faced with massive shortages of food and other essential products.

“The authorities face an enormous task, involving reforms of the legal, financial and trade systems and also of vital sectors of the economy, especially agriculture, distribution, energy and manufacturing,” the report said.

It was prepared by the International Monetary Fund with help from the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

“These changes cannot be made in a matter of weeks,” the study concluded. “But the imperative is to make sufficient progress at the beginning so that reform is seen as an irreversible break with the past and the process gains an unstoppable momentum.”

The Western experts conceded that the plan they were putting forward could not be implemented without economic pain, but said they knew of no other way to transform the Soviet system.

“Ideally, a path of gradual reform could be laid out which would minimize economic disturbance and lead to an early harvesting of the fruits of increased economic efficiency,” the study said. “But we know of no such path, the more particularly given the difficult starting conditions.”

But the study said that Gorbachev had passed the point of no return in his efforts, saying it would probably be impossible to reinstitute a centrally planned economy even if he wanted to.

Therefore, the experts urged the Soviet leaders “to move rapidly to give substance to their commitment to a market economy.”

While calling for technical assistance to help the Soviets in their efforts to discard seven decades of a planned economy, the study said that massive amounts of Western aid would not be useful right now.