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 assumed that the same distribution of taxes estimated for the 1972 I-O table is also valid for 1970. The taxes included in final-demand values are then subtracted directly. The taxes paid by each sector when it purchases material inputs are subtracted from each entry in that sector’s column of the I-O table, summed, and placed in a new row in the value-added quadrant. The new row is necessary to preserve the equality between a sector’s output and input. The purchase price of any good includes the transpor- tation expenses necessary to deliver the good from the producer to the purchaser. Since this expense is not a real cost of production and can be highly variable depending on the transportation mode and the type and location of the purchaser, a better estimate of the structure of production costs is obtained by subtract- ing this transportation expense. The cost of transpor- tation still exists, but is now shown as a separate purchase in the transportation row. If a complete purchasers’ prices table is available, the reallocation of transportation expenses is simple. First the value of each sector’s purchases of transportation and communications services is deleted and the value of its gross output is reduced by the same amount. This value represents the amount paid by the produc- ing sector for the delivery of its output to purchasers. Then the same value is removed from that sector’s row by assuming that the proportion of transportation and communications expenses in each sector’s sales is equal. For example, if a sector’s purchases from the transportation sector in purchasers’ prices is equal to 5 percent of its gross output, then it is assumed that 5 percent of that sector’s sales to each other sector and to final demand represents transportation expenses. The values removed from all of a sector’s material purchases are summed and entered as a single pur- chase of transportation and communications services. This value represents the amount paid by the produc- ing sector for the delivery of its material inputs. In this case, a complete purchasers’ prices table is not available. Therefore, it was assumed that the propor- tion of each sector’s sales that represented transporta- tion and communications services in 1970 was the same as it was in 1972. The transportation purchases by each sector were then summed and compared with the gross output of the transportation and communi- cations sector. The calculated amount, 27.1 billion rubles, was 5 percent higher than the published gross output, (25.7 billi0n—Narkh0z I 978, p. 41). All of the 1972 transportation rates were lowered by 5 percent to remove the discrepancy, and the calculations were repeated. The trade and distribution expenses were reallocated using the same procedure as for transportation. This operation is slightly more complicated because there are sharply different markups for wholesale trade, retail trade, and agricultural procurement services. Again the rates used for the 1972 I-O table were assumed to be valid for 1970, and the gross output of the trade sector was calculated. Again, the resulting total was 5 percent greater than the gross output of the trade sector. The same proportional reduction of the 1972 trade and distribution rates was used to remove the discrepancy. Subsidies were removed in an analogous manner to turnover taxes and other fees. The subsidies row in the value-added quadrant was deleted, and the gross output of each sector was increased by the same amount. The same amount was then allocated among purchasing sectors and final demand, using the distri- bution of the corresponding subsidies in the 1972 I-O table. Finally, the estimated subsidies received by each sector on its material purchases were summed and entered as a new row in the value-added quadrant. Estimating a 1970 Input-Output Table The computation described in the previous two sec- tions produced a partial 1970 I-O table in producers’ prices. The remaining parts of the table were estimat- ed based on the assumption that all production rela- tionships should be as similar as possible to what they were in 1972 and yet be consistent with the data already filled in. 166 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.