Book excerpt: This study looks at the tiny but growing volume of consumer advertising even in countries such as the Soviet Union, which had detailed central planning, and substantially more in the recently decentralised Hungarian economy and pre-invasion Czechoslovakia. And of course, outside the Soviet orbit there was the relatively market-oriented and Westernised Yugoslav economy. This suggested that there were after all some interesting questions to answer: Why did an administrative economy like the Soviet one have any domestic consumer advertising at all, and why was it, apparently, growing? What did evidence from Hungary and Yugoslavia suggest about the scale and functions of advertising in more decentralised socialist economies? This title was first published in 1974.