The socialist fiscal system was implicit in the vertical structure of planning and prices. In the Soviet Union, virtually all investment activity was channeled through the budget. The primary nominal sources of tax revenue were enterprise profits and resource rents, turnover taxes charged on the difference between retail prices of consumer goods and their nominal enterprise cost, and profits of a foreign trade monopoly. Loans from the central bank provided the treasury with an additional, inflationary source of spending, even though administrative pricing transformed this inflation into chronic shortages. In pre-reform China, too, savings were centralized in.
