The records kept through decades of the mismanaged Soviet centralized economy are generally considered to be unreliable.

"Albania entered the market economy no more than four years ago, coming from a strong centralized economy," he said.

"A centralized economy is good up to a point for poor countries," she said.

"The practice of socialist countries has so far proved that an extremely centralized economy does not work well," he wrote recently in People's Daily.

No one knows how to privatize a centralized economy because it has never been done.

Prewar Iraq, on the other hand, had a highly centralized economy and government, which has now collapsed.

The centralized economy has shored up the role of the despot.

It is especially difficult to restructure a statist centralized economy into a functioning market system.

The Soviet Union and other communist nations with a centralized planned economy were controlled price systems.

But he said Government contacts open the possibility of much broader horizons in a mostly centralized economy.