Programme-Target Method, method of dovetailing the goals of the social and economic development plan with a complex of economic, social, scientific, technological and production measures, and with economic resources ensuring that they will be implemented. The development and utilisation of the method is dependent on the deepening social division of labour and increased cooperation between various production links of the national economic complex which contribute to attaining the aims of socialist society. This method makes it possible to combine, in a planned way, the efforts of various participants in social production and direct them toward concrete objectives. It is expressed in drawing up of special programmes used in management practice. The programme-target method is the product of planned management of the socialist economy. It was first used in the USSR in drafting the State Plan for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) which was, in Lenin’s words, the Party’s second programme. Recently it has been more widely used in the system of planned economic management under developed socialism. Improved planning and the greater impact of the economic mechanism on the effectiveness of social production and the quality of work implies the increasing use of this method in planning, and determining the major state programmes for various aspects of the development of socialist society. Each concrete programme includes the following: precise determination of the target characterised by the respective results of programme fulfilment; a complex of measures and variants of their implementation in the time periods and volume of required resources (associated measures may be organised as independent subprogrammes); evaluation of economic effectiveness and the socio-economic consequences of the fulfilment of each variant from the viewpoint of achieving the programme’s general objective; manner of realising the programme, which regulates the implementation of measures concerned with each of them and the programme as a whole; and the schedule for the work complex as a whole. Programmes may be used in the various areas of socialist society for attaining specific scientific, technological, socio-economic, organisational-economic, defence, ecological and other targets. Depending on the degree to which the single economic complex has been encompassed, we can single out the following: countrywide programmes elaborated to reach the most important objectives of socialist society (greater socialist economic integration, higher living standards for the people, comprehensive programme for scientific and technical progress); inter-sectoral programmes aimed at achieving the important objectives of social development. Measures to carry out these programmes concern several sectors of the Soviet economy (development of the fuel and energy and agro-industrial complexes, transport, in particular building of the Baikal-Amur Railway); functional programmes designed to promote overall social development. Programmes of this kind concern the mechanisation of manual labour, economising fuel and energy resources, and certain avenues of scientific and technical progress. There are also 294 regional programmes aimed at developing the productive forces of individual economic regions (the Non-Black-Earth Zone, Siberia, etc.); and local programmes involving the specific activities of individual economic branches, production associations and regional bodies. Implementation of the programme-target method at the modern stage of building communism in the Soviet Union is based on the extensive use of the economico-mathematical methods and computer technology. Planning and economic bodies and research institutions prepare methodological material on how to elaborate programmes, which are an organic part of the general methodology of state planning.