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 An Index of Industrial Production in the USSR Introduction Any attempt to assess Soviet economic development and to measure aggregate economic activity requires a reliable measure of industrial production. The official measures prepared by Soviet statistical agencies are unreliable by Western standards, so independent esti- mates are necessary.‘ The CIA’s Office of Economic Research Indexes of Soviet Industrial Production (SPIOER) circumvent weaknesses inherent in official statistics. These indexes, first published in 1963, have been revised over the years to improve the methodolo- gy and adjust to data availability.’ The current revisions, like their predecessors, adopt as a model the Federal Reserve Board’s industrial pro- duction index for the United States. The revised methodology enhances SPIOER’s compatibility with the structure of Soviet input-output tables and makes the SPIOER branch indexes more comparable in scope with official time series. Frequent changes in reporting procedures—a persistent problem with Sovi- et data—make earlier versions of the indexes less representative with time and force an inappropriate reliance on obsolete data. Therefore, this revision of SPIOER tries to conform to current Soviet reporting practices. ‘ The problems of the official Soviet measures are discussed in CIA, Comparing Planned and Actual Growth of Industrial Output in Centrally Planned Economies, ER 80-10461 (August 1980). ’ Descriptions of the changing methodology behind these indexes have been published over the years. For example, the writings of the late Rush V. Greenslade are especially prolific on this topic. In particular, see “Industrial Production Statistics in the USSR,” in Vladimir G. Treml and John P. Hardt, eds., Soviet Economic Statistics, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 155-194; with Wade Robertson, “Industrial Production in the USSR," Soviet Economic Prospects for the Seventies, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, June 27, 1973), pp. 270-282; and “The Real Gross National Product of the USSR, 1950-75," Soviet Economy in a New Perspective, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee (Washing- ton, D.C.: Government Printing Office, October 14, 1976), pp. 269- 300. See also F. Douglas Whitehouse and Ray Converse, “Soviet Industry: Recent Performance and Future Prospects,” Soviet Econ- omy in a Time of Change, vol. 1, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Octo- ber 10, 1979), pp. 402-422. This paper first describes the updated SPIOER proce- dures. The revised methodology is described in terms of the taxonomy of the individual indexes, the stand- ard approach, the special case of machinery, and the computation of the total industry index. The next section presents the indexes and discusses the pattern of industrial growth from 1950 to 1980. In the last section both the indexes and the samples are subjected to several tests to determine their reasonableness. The Revised Methodology Taxonomy of the Industrial Index The revised industrial production index uses a five- tier stratification of industry: ~ Individual products, for example, iron ore. ' Input-output sectors, for example, ferrous ores. ' Branches of industry, for example, ferrous metals. ' Major industry groups, for example, industrial materials. ' Total industry. The process of going from product samples to an index of total industrial production is summarized in figure 2. Product data are aggregated into sector indexes using l July 1967 prices as weights. That is, output of a given product in physical units is multi- plied by its July 1967 price, and the value is summed together with like values for other products of the sector to obtain a value from which a sector index can be calculated. Branch indexes are calculated from sector indexes using value added derived from the 1972 input-output table in producer prices to elimi- nate the double-counting inherent in adding the value of output of earlier stages of production to values at later stages—for example, adding the value of iron ore to the value of steel. The aggregations from branches to industry groups and finally to total 179 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.