Documents / FOIA release

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. 184 …Metalwares, metal structurals, light industry and processed food industry machinery and equipment, and mineral chemicals are…
  • p. 271 …meals, fish meal, and vitamin and mineral supplements as well as ground hay and other materials…
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Table 1 Percent
Share of Branch Value Added in 1972 Accounted for
by Different Statistical Series
Branch Type of Series
Quantity CSA Value CSA GVO Unrepresented K
All industry 73.3 10.7 8.0 8.0
Ferrous metals 94.8 5.2
Nonferrous metals 62.7 37.3
Fuel 100.00
Electric power 100.00
Machinery 53.3 18.5 23.9 4.3
Chemicals 77.4 4.1 18.7
pulp, and paper products 78.4 16.7 4.9
Construction materials 100.00
Light industry 63.9 36.1
Processed food 100.00
8 This category consists of industrial activity lacking any representa-
tion in SPIOER, such as nonferrous ores, cable products, and tools
and dies.
As indicated above, the impact of the less desirable
CSA value and index series on all industrial indexes is
confined to less than one-fifth of the weight. Ideally,
the relative importance of each type of series would be
about the same in the various branches of industry as
in the total, so that no branch index would suffer more
from the biased sector indexes than any other. Unfor-
tunately, this is not the case. Only about one-half of
the machinery index is accounted for by quantity
series, nearly one-fifth by value series, and approxi-
mately one-fourth by the least desirable GVO series.
Other than machinery, the impact of the value and
GVO series on branch estimates is quite limited (table
1). Only in light industry do value series represent
more than one-third of total value.“
The highest level of subaggregation is the major
industry group, which resembles the major compo-
nents of the Federal Reserve Board’s index of US
" “Light industry” as used in this paper differs from the standard
light- industry versus heavy-industry dichotomy used in the West.
An appropriate synonym for light industry in the present context is
soft goods consisting of articles such as textiles, clothing, and
footwear.
industrial production (table 2). SPIOER has three
major groups: industrial materials, total machinery,
and consumer nondurables.
Construction of the Standard Indexes
Alternative Approaches. Measurement of output be-
comes a problem when the output of several diverse
products must be combined into one series. One
approach, and the basic method employed in the
USSR, sums the values of the individual products to
yield the gross value of output (GVO). This index
usually appears in one of two variants. The first, the
gross turnover of output (valovoy oborot), includes
intraplant consumption of a plant’s own products
calculated by summing the value of output of individ-
ual workshops within the plant. Most Soviet produc-
tion statistics that are published in physical quantities
include intraplant consumption. A second variant, the
gross product (valovaya produktsiya), removes mate-
rials and intermediate products fabricated by work-
shops that are consumed within the plant. In general,
184
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.