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 production. The two sets of value-added weights for each machinery sector are applied to the various sector output indexes to compute separate output series for the two types of durables. These series are then combined with estimated military durable production to arrive at an index for total machinery output. Several tests have been performed on the synthetic indexes for reasonable- ness in terms of consistency with collateral information, the representative.- ness of the sample, and biases in the basic data. Although, as expected, the synthetic indicator of industrial progress shows slower growth than the Soviet official index, the configurations of trends are similar in both indexes. The consistency is best for the most recent period, where gross dis- tortions in official data seem less than in the past. Trends in the most im- portant segment of industrial outpu.t—producer durables—can be com- pared to the key end-use component of investment in machinery and equipment. When this comparison is made, the two series match closely. The data are inadequate to test directly for the representativeness of the sample—a crucial factor in establishing the legitimacy of any index. The high share of the total production covered by the sample in l972—the year of the most recent input-output table, which provides information on the total volume of production—suggests that it is representative. The samples for six of the 10 branches of industry represent more than 60 percent of to- tal branch output in 1972. Coverage is poorest in nonferrous metals and chemicals and petrochemicals. In another test of the SPIOER’s accuracy, the industrial growth implied by the 1959, 1966, and 1972 input-output tables was compared with the growth registered by SPIOER indexes over the same periods. The SPIOER samples generally grow more slowly. This could suggest some downward bias in the synthetic indexes, but the discrepancy could also result from us- ing the spurious official price indexes to deflate the input-output tables to constant prices to arrive at “comparable” growth rates with the synthetic indexes. SPIOER’s reliance on gross output rather than value-added indexes could be an important source of bias but does not seem to be. We in effect are as- suming at the sector level that the ratio of value added to gross output has remained constant. Analysis of the gross output and value-added compo- nents of the input-output tables for 1959, 1966, and 1972 suggests that the error resulting from this assumption is not serious. The performance of SPIOER is least satisfactory in controlling the biases in the basic data. Series that measure output in quantity terms almost certainly understate the true growth rate because they fail to account for 177 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.