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 In addition to gaps in coverage for the earlier years, there are numerous problems with the more recent data, which are both difficult to quantify and poten- tially more serious. During the past decade, Soviet statistical authorities have continuously reduced the amount of information reported from one year to the next. The “Industry” section in the latest Narkhoz, for example, contains only 80 pages in contrast to the 142 pages in the 1970 edition. At least 10 percent of the SPIOER series published directly in the Narkhoz in 1970 no longer appear there. Thus, greater reliance must be placed on estimates based on other sources. The information on which to base these estimates also has become more fragmentary, so that the estimates are more subject to error. Since the Soviets are more likely to delete publication of a series when its growth trend becomes unfavorable, SPIOER estimates may suffer from an upward bias. Fortunately, the series deleted from standard publication so far have not had a major impact on the SPIOER sample, but the trend is potentially troublesome. In terms of the absolute number of sample items, the physical output series dominate-—they account for 292 (94 percent) of the 312 statistical series in the index. (See appendix A-1 for a listing of the sample.) The CSA value series account for another 4 percent and the GVO indexes comprise the remaining 2 percent of the sample. Comparisons of the absolute number of statistical series are deceptive, however, because some series have significantly greater impact on the aggregate indexes than other series. The approximate share of each type of statistical series in the industry portion of the 1972 Soviet input-output table weighted by value added is: Type of Series Percent Including Unrepresented Products ° Excluding Unrepresented Products Quantity 73.3 79.7 CSA rubles 10.7 11.6 CSA gross value of output 8.0 8.7 index Unrepresented 8.0 = Unrepresented products are those items lacking any SPIOER counterpart. Some examples of this are cable products, tools and dies, and construction materials machinery and equipment. The relative importance of value and index series based on the share of industrial output they represent is three times more than their importance based strictly upon a count of the number of series used. Nonetheless, quantity series still have much the larg- est weight in the calculation of SPIOER indexes. Sectors, Branches, and Groups. The next step-up in the taxonomy of the industrial production index is the input-output sector. This level is based on the 88- sector version of the 1972 input-output table in pro- ducer prices, of which only the first 81 sectors consti- tute Soviet industry.° The remaining sectors consist of nonindustrial activity such as agriculture, transporta- tion, communications, and retail trade. Adapting SPIOER indexes to the input-output framework per- mits us to (1) compare our indexes with the 1959, 1966, and 1972 input-output tables, (2) determine changes in the production mix over time, (3) judge the representativeness of our sample, and (4) most impor- tantly, employ value-added weights at a fairly disag- gregated level. SPIOER product series currently rep- resent all but 12 of the 84 industrial sectors. Of the 72 sectors covered, 58 sector indexes are determined at least partially by quantity samples, ll are partly value series, and five are based solely on the CSA gross value of output indexes. The level immediately above the input-output sector is the Soviet branch (otrasl '), which is formed by com- bining selected input-output sectors. Branch-level in- dexes have three advantages: (l) the 10 major branches are much more manageable for analysis than the numerous input-output sectors; (2) the branch structure matches published Soviet data and, therefore, facilitates comparisons and tests of the SPIOER indexes; and (3) value added at factor cost can be calculated from Soviet data only at the branch level or above in l970—the base year for CIA‘s GNP accounts.“ ’ The metal-producing sectors are an exception. The 1972 recon- structed input-output table combines ferrous metals, ferrous ores, nonferrous metals, and nonferrous ores into one sector. This is inadequate disaggregation for our purposes. Thus, we use relation- ships among these four sectors from the 1966 table in 1970 producer prices to estimate value added in the four sectors in 1972. For our purposes, therefore, the input-output table has 84 industrial sectors. '° See JEC, GNP, I950-80. 183 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.