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.
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 more resources were devoted to machinery for con- sumer industries, precision instruments, motor vehi- cles, and agricultural machinery. In the 1970s, pro- ducer durables growth has slowed with the rest of industry, especially the production of motor vehicles, freight cars, agricultural machinery, instruments, and equipment for consumer industries. Consumer Nonduraples. Light industry and processed food generally have been the slowest growing branches of industry. Production of consumer goods traditionally has not had the highest priority, and production of consumer nondurables by its very na- ture reflects performance in the trouble-plagued agri- cultural sector. Although both processed food and light industry fared well during the early boom period, output was still at extremely low levels. Both branches experienced a sharp decline in growth during the early 1960s, with the burden felt most severely by light industry. This decline reflected both a diversion of investment re- sources away from the consumer branches and rela- tively poor agricultural performance during 1961-64. By the middle of the decade, the growth of nondura- bles accelerated somewhat as crops improved and the increased production of machinery for consumer in- dustries began to have an impact on output. Light industry especially profited from this shift that tempo- rarily allowed consumer nondurables to grow faster than the industrial average. After the peak growth of nondurables output recorded in 1967, growth again trended sharply downward. Light industry fell back to its usual low growth patterns after the initial surge of new capital stock had worked its way through the system. The poor agricultural performance of the 1970s hampered pro- cessed food production: after the I975 crop failure, processed food production declined absolutely in I976, for the first time in the post-Stalin era. In addition, output in this branch declined twice more during the 10th Five-Year Plan. Evaluation of the New Indexes Since SPIOER was developed because the official industrial production indexes released by the CSA are unreliable, we need to judge the degree of improve- ment that SPIOER represents. We examine the syn- thetic indexes from several perspectives. One criterion is for consistency with the official data. Although the official indexes are unreliable growth measures, the SPIOER and official indexes should at least agree on the configuration of trends, and the indexes should at least roughly correspond regarding the relative growth among sectors. In addition, these indexes should satisfactorily remove the growth distortions; we would expect that generally the SPIOER growth rate should fall below the official rates. A second criterion is for the product sample to be representative of total industrial output. Although the inclusion in the sample of a large share of industrial product should help satisfy this standard, this does not guaran- tee that the sample will move as total industrial output especially if the material intensity of produc- tion has changed over time. According to a third citerion, any biases in the basic data should be minimal or at least partially offsetting. In this section of the paper, the SPIOER indexes are subjected to a series of tests to determine how well they satisfy the criteria of consistency, representativeness, and mini- mal bias. Consistency Tests Consistency With the Official Indexes. Consistency first implies that both sets of indexes——synthetic and official-—should show roughly similar relative rates of growth among the branches of industry. Where differ- ences arise in the fastest or slowest growth sectors, there should be a plausible explanation. To test this property, average annual rates of growth were computed for six periods for every branch of industry for both SPIOER and the official indexes.“ For each five-year period the branches were ranked 1‘ The nonferrous metals branch was excluded from this and other tests because the CSA does not publish an appropriate index for that branch. 198 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.