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USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and Development, 1950-80

Central Intelligence Agency · 1982-12-08 · 399 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 18 …Power, United Nations International Comparisons Project, Phase I (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) ICP…
  • p. 19 …Oleg 1-Ioeffding, Soviet National Income and Product in 1928, Columbia University Press, New York, 1954…
  • p. 21 …In theory, the Soviets " Basic Principles of the System of Balances of the National Economy, United…
  • p. 50 …Lawrence Grose, Real Output Measurement in the United States National Income and Product Accounts, US Department…
  • p. 166 …The subsidies on housing, recreation, and the press were allocated to the housing, recreation, and other…
  • p. 181 …Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 155-194; with Wade Robertson, “Industrial Production in the USSR," Soviet…
  • p. 183 …tons, square meters, units of production, or some other convention- al measure. Examples of this type…
  • p. 210 …For example, the production of commodities pub- lished in physical units includes intraplant turnover, but the…
  • p. 222 …bulbs Units Narkhoz Machine tools sector ml Meta? cutting machine tools Rubles Narkhoz Forge presses sector…
  • p. 249 …Hardt, eds., Soviet Economic Statistics, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1972 Treml and Hardt U…
  • p. 261 …Khrushchev stat- ed that “figures for average yield (of grain) which you read in the press…
  • p. 308 …central press. 8 Because the official data have again been made available to the United States…
  • p. 320 …Power, United Nations International Comparisons Project, Phase I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) ICP…
  • p. 321 …2 For details, see United Nations, Comparisons ofthe System of National Accounts and the System of…
  • p. 328 …Judging from a mass of anecdotal evidence from the Soviet press concerning the poor quality of…
  • p. 342 …Although the average size of a dwelling unit increased between 1950 and 1978-by 17 percent…
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Contents
Page
Summary _ 175
Introduction 179
The Revised Methodology 179
Taxonomy of the Industrial Index 179
The Product Sample 180
Sectors, Branches, and Groups 183H
Construction of the Standard Indexes 184
Alternative Approaches 184W 7 Derivation of the Branch Indexes 187
The Machinery Index 188
The Index of Total Industrial Gutput g _ g
190
Soviet Industrial Growth, 1950-80 190
Revised SPIOER Indexes 190
Major Trends in Industrial Production 192
Industrial Materials 197
Machinery 197 '
Consumer Nondurables 198
Evaluation of the New Indexes 198
Consistency Tests 198
Consistency With the Official Indexes 198
Plausible Elimination of Inflated Growth 200
Consistency of Growth Trends 200
Consistency With Investment Series 203
Sample Representativeness
“TWP 7 GGGGG If WT 207I
Sample Coverage 7
gwflm 7 I
H207
A Rough Measure of Sample Representativeness 208
Biases in the Basic Data 210
Changes in the Material Intensity of Production 210
Biases in the Quantity and Value Data 212I I WW7‘ I “ The Importance of Disguised Inflation
W
215
Appendixes
A. The SPIOER Sample and Sector Indexes 219
B. Computation of the Machinery Index 241
171
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.