Under the command economy it was one of the very few companies that regularly did business with the West and thus had access to convertible currencies.

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It has served as the model of the autarkic command economy that East bloc countries like Poland have largely been forced to emulate.

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Strauss about the serious harm that can be done to international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank if an unreformed command economy like the Soviet Union's is prematurely made eligible for their lending programs.

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It was between running a society from the top down, with central control and a command economy, and from the bottom up, with dispersed power and a market economy.

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China has adopted market economics while Cuba still has a command system with most of the economy under state control.

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"We are not a command economy, " sniffs the SAR's secretary for trade and industry, Brian Chau Tak-hay, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

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And although business plans cannot reproduce, successful ones do command a growing share of the economy's resources, as companies expand on the back of them and rivals copy them.

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But Iraq suffers from one major disadvantage: it has been run, like the former Soviet Union, as a command-and-control economy.

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Among them: a common desire to evolve from a command to a market economy, a mutual interest in containing Islam-fired nationalism in the new republics of Central Asia, and growing economic ties.

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