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.
“Cooper”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Net Additions to Livestock This index is derived by Margaret Hughes and Barba- ra Severin in JEC, Agriculture. Capital Repair Scope and Coverage. This sector includes the capital repair of machinery and equipment and of buildings and structures. It defies comparison with similar activities in US or other Western GNP accounts because much of the comparable activity evidently is either charged to current expenses or included with new fixed investment in Western statistics. Description of the Index. The index is the sum of two deflated current-price series—capital repair of ma- chinery and equipment and capital repair of buildings and structures. Both series are derived in an unpub- lished working paper by Scot Butler (“The Growth of Capital Repair in the USSR, 1950-77”). First total capital repair expenditures are estimated, based main- ly on current-price amortization deductions for capital repair. A series on capital repair of buildings and structures is then derived based mainly on budgetary expenditure data. Using estimated expenditures in 1970, the two indexes are converted to 1970 ruble values, and expenditures for capital repair of machin- ery and equipment are derived as a residual. The two components of capital repair are deflated separately to constant 1970 prices. The price deflator for total construction (table B-3, column 4) is used also for capital repair of buildings and structures. Expenditures for capital repair of machinery and equipment are deflated by a price index based on a comparison of the gross output of the machinery sector in current and constant prices. The current- price series for machinery output is built up from data on wages, social security deductions, the ratio of wages and social security deductions to production costs, and profits. The index of machinery output in constant prices is derived in the same manner as the index of the value added in the machinery sector (described by Ray Converse in JEC, Industry), but gross output weights are used to combine the various machinery subsector indexes rather than value-added weights. The deflated machinery capital repair series and the derivation of the total capital repair series are shown in table C-3. 121 Other Government Expenditures Government Administrative Services The indexes used to measure this activity are the same as those used for the sector-of-origin indexes. Theoret- ically, a separate measure of real trends in material purchases should be added to the measure of trends in employment. Despite a considerable amount of re- search, it has not proved feasible to produce reliable estimates of material purchases, nor can a suitable price deflator be obtained. According to one Soviet estimate, material expenditures in administration in current prices increased at about the same rate as man-hour employment during 1960-72 (V. M. Rut- gayzer, Resursy razvitiya neproizvodstvennoy sfery, pp. 157-158). The weights used to combine the subsec- tor indexes are the end-use expenditures in 1970. Research and Development This index is the same as that used for science as a sector of origin. Outlays Not Elsewhere Classified (n.e.c.) The item is derived as a residual by subtracting all identified end-use components from total GNP de- rived from the sector-of-origin data. Defense As stated in the main report, defense expenditures are not computed as a separate component of GNP by end use because it is believed that other components, primarily investment and research and development, include substantial amounts of defense expenditures. The CIA does periodically estimate the cost of Soviet defense activities based on a detailed list of the physical elements of their defense programs and ruble values derived from a variety of sources. Using data in this report, we have converted these estimates to factor-cost prices. Table C-4 shows these estimates as ranges. Although it has not been possible to integrate the estimates of total defense expenditures with our GNP data, we have made some sample calculations based 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 above. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.