Wiktionary
n. (context economics politics English) An economic system in which government directly manages supply and demand for goods and services by controlling production, prices, and distribution in accordance with a long-term design and schedule of objectives.
Wikipedia
A planned economy is an economic system in which inputs are based on direct allocation. Economic planning may be carried out in a decentralized, distributed or centralized manner depending on the specific organization of economic institutions. An economy based on economic planning (either through the state, an association of worker cooperatives or another economic entity that has jurisdiction over the means of production) appropriates its resources as needed, so that allocation comes in the form of internal transfers involving the purchasing of assets by one government agency or firm by another. In a traditional model of planning, decision-making would be carried out by workers and consumers on the enterprise-level.
Planned economies are held in contrast to unplanned economies, such as the market economy and proposed self-managed economy, where production, distribution, pricing, and investment decisions are made by autonomous firms based upon their individual interests rather than upon a macroeconomic plan. Less extensive forms of planned economies include those that use indicative planning as components of a market-based or mixed economy, in which the state employs "influence, subsidies, grants, and taxes, but does not compel." This latter is sometimes referred to as a "planned market economy". In some instances, the term planned economy has been used to refer to national economic development plans and state-directed investment in market economies.
Planned economies are usually categorized as a particular variant of socialism.
Usage examples of "planned economy".
When he'd established the country's central-planned economy, Stalin had made a deliberate effort to spread out production sites, so that each segment of the vast empire would depend for vital commodities upon every other, but he'd overlooked the discordant fact that if the entire economy went to pot, then needing something you couldn't get from one source meant that you had to get it from another, and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, smuggling, which had been well controlled under Communist rule, had become a genuine industry of its own.
From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins -- that job will never be quite so ghastly again.
This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck.