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 improvements in quality and changes in product mix. While this conceptu- al problem applies to nearly all the quantity series, it undoubtedly is most serious in the machinery branch. Similarly, disguised inflation that enters the value series, usually under the guise of new-product pricing, leads to an overstatement of growth. This occurs when enterprise managers make minor modifications to an existing product to justify a price higher than would be warranted by the marginal improvement. This problem is most acute in the machinery branch, especially in producer durables where the value series have a large weight and grow much faster than the physical output series. On one hand, evidence suggests that the quantity series may bias the growth rate for selected machinery products downward by as much as 1 percentage point per year; the bias in quantity series for other branches probably is smaller. On the other hand, indications exist that disguised inflation in the value series in our machinery sample may display growth trends that are biased upward by as much as 3 percentage points per year. (The value series are not a significant problem in other branches because of their infrequent use and small weight.) As for the net effect of these biases, if all the difference in growth rates be- tween the value and physical series in the producer durables sector, where the problems of bias are the worst, were actually attributable to inflation, the SPIOER index would overstate machinery growth by a maximum of 1.2 percentage points per year and overall industrial growth by 0.3 percentage point. But the machinery inflation bias is probably much less because the quantity series, by understating growth, partially offset the upward biases of the value series. 178 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.