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.
“V.M.”23 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Soviet employment data. The share of municipal (2) services in this employment category was estimated at l3 percent in 1970 (CIA, GNP I970, p. 54). In the absence of other information, this share was assumed to be the same in all other years. Man-hour employ- ment in “housing-communal economy and personal services” in 1950-78 is given in Rapawy, Civilian Employment, p. 14, and extended to 1980 by the same methodology. Civilian Police. As a category in Soviet annual statistics on employment in the state sector, civilian police does not exist. In the 1959 population census the Soviets explicitly reported employment for “work- ers in protection of socialist property and public order"-—429,000 persons. The 1970 census does not list such a category. Whether civilian police (militia) are included somewhere in the total number in the state labor force (workers and employees) reported annually in the statistical handbooks is uncertain. Civilian police might be: (1) considered to be part of the armed forces, (2) omitted entirely from unpub- lished figures on military manpower and from report- ed data on employment, or (3) included somewhere in the regularly published annual statistics on state employment. The first possibility is ruled out for constructing GNP accounts because of the definition of armed forces that has been adopted. The second treatment is possible, but it seems unlikely that the Soviets would omit them altogether; they are a highly visible and entirely legitimate activity in a modern state. The third possibility seems plausible and is the approach adopted here. The estimate relies in part on the work of Stephen Rapawy, Comparison of U.S. and U.S.S.R. Civilian Employment in Government. The argument supporting this approach is as follows: This approach yields an estimate for police em- ployment that seems appropriate to the size and extent of urbanization of the USSR and to the nature of the society. By way of comparison, total government employment in police protection in the United States—a much more urban society— in 1966 was 437,000 (Statistical Abstract ofthe United States, Washington, D. C., Government Printing Office, 1967, p. 439). To obtain a time series for police employment, the estimate for 1966 was extrapolated on the as- sumption that the trend in police employment is the same as reported for state administration and the administrative organs of social organizations. Both groups would be likely to have been affected by the shakeup in the police and bureaucracy that occurred during the 1950s; this phenomenon is reflected in the statistics. This approach yields a figure of 452,000 for police employment in 1959; the 1959 census reported 429,000 persons as em- ployed in “protection of socialist property and public order.” The alternative to the procedure adopted here is to assume that the function of police protection is omitted from Soviet published employment statis- tics. To account for what is obviously a sizable activity it would then be necessary to adopt an arbitrary estimate for the number of police, their average wages, and other costs and to make an equally arbitrary assumption about trends over time. Although arbitrary assumptions are also involved in the procedure used here, the results produce a plausible measure of levels and trends in police protection activity. (l) A large unexplained residual of employment exists in the Soviet category “Other branches of materi- al production.” Rapawy estimated this residual at 551,000 in 1966 by deducting from total reported employment in “other branches of material pro- duction" the reported employment in component subgroups. No employment was reported for the subgroup “interdepartmental guard,” which is classified in “other branches of material produc- tion" (Ukazaniya, pp. 751-752). 115 The index used to measure police protection activity is an index of man-hour employment. Average annual employment was estimated for 1966, as explained above, and extrapolated on the basis of trends in man- hour employment in state administration and the 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.