Documents / FOIA release
This Joint Committee Print, dated December 8, 1982, gathers studies that the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. It gives estimates of Soviet gross national product for 1950 to 1980, with indexes of industrial production, agricultural production and consumption, and explains the methods and data behind them. The foreword says official Soviet statistics inflate growth and that the CIA measures offer a more accurate picture. The document contains no UFO material.
“Gross”60+ pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 progressa, Moscow, Ekonomika, 1974, p. 40. Presum- ably, the associated employment and earnings are counted in the education sector. Also not included are research and development activities carried out in the laboratories and design organizations of individual producing enterprises (Ibid, pp. 39-40). These expend- itures are sizable, but are considered a part of the production activity of each enterprise and are charged to product costs. Science is treated as a separate producing sector here because employment and wage data are given sepa- rately in Soviet statistics. In the US national accounts by sector of origin, employment in comparable activi- ties would be included mainly in the government, services, and manufacturing sectors. There are no data on the basis of which to distribute reported Soviet employment in science among employment categories comparable to US practice. The science index is a weighted composite of indexes of man-hour employment and material inputs. The inclusion of a materials component in the index is designed to capture some manufacturing type of activity, mainly of prototypes or unique custom-built equipment, that apparently takes place in research institutes under branch ministries. Weights. The weights of the man-hour employment and material-input indexes are the estimated ruble expenditures for both components in 1970. The weight for the man-hour employment component (5.296 billion rubles) is the sum of wages and social security allowances (table D-7). The weight for the material-input component (4.463 billion rubles) is estimated in table B-18 as a part of the material-input index. Description of the Index. Man-Hour Employment. The man-hour employment data, column 4 of table B-19, are from Stephen Rapawy, Civilian Employ- ment in the USSR: 1950 to I978, Washington, D. C., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980, p. 23 for 1950-78 and extended to 1980 by the same methodology. 109 Material Inputs. This is a deflated current-price inclex. The derivation of the series in current prices is shown in table B-18. Data in current prices are available for 1960-72 in Soviet sources. Values for other years are calculated as estimated shares of “outlays on science from the state budget and other sources,” which are published in the Narkhoz. The expenditures on material inputs in current prices are converted to 1970 prices by a weighted average of wholesale price indexes for 10 branches of industry (ferrous metallurgy, coal, oil, electric power, machin- ery, chemicals, wood products, construction materials, light industry, and food industry). The weights to combine the 10 indexes are obtained from the struc- ture of purchases by science and administration in 1970 published by V. M. Rutgayzer, Resursy razvi- tiya neproizvodstvenno sfery, Moscow, Mysl’, 1975, p. 168. Science purchases were about 86 percent of this total. All of the price indexes except the one for machinery are the official indexes published in the Narkhoz (for example, Narkhoz I979, p. 164). The official index for machinery is believed to understate price increases badly in that branch. Accordingly, an alternative price index estimated by Abraham Becker for 1958-70 (“The Price Level of Soviet Machinery in the 19605,” Soviet Studies 26, July 1974, pp. 363- 379) was used. Estimates for 1950-57 were obtained by extrapolation on the basis of annual changes given by the official index. Since 1970, a rate of increase of 1 percent annually was assumed, except for 1971 and 1973, when price reductions were assumed to offset the general inflationary pressures from other sources. The resulting aggregate price index and the derivation of the total science index are shown in table B-19. Credit and Insurance Scope and Coverage. This sector includes the activi- ties of the state bank (Gosbank), the construction bank (Stroybank), the foreign trade bank, the system of savings banks, and the insurance enterprises (Ukazan- iya, p. 760). Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.