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 by growth rates. A statistical test was then performed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to de- termine the degree of agreement in branch growth rankings between the SPIOER and official indexes.” The results are summarized in table 7. The sum of squared differences indicate that the rank correlation coefficients for the 1960s and 1970s are significant at the 99-percent confidence level—strong statistical evi- dence that both SPIOER and official branch indexes exhibit similar relative growth. The 1950s are a different matter, however, as the correlation is not significant at this level of confidence. The source of this insignificance is the wide disagreement over the machinery rankings. Both quinquenniums in the 1950s give machinery a rank four places higher in the official indexes than in the SPIOER versions. Perhaps disguised inflation operated at higher rates then than in the later periods. In every five-year period except 1971-75, both indexes agree on the most rapidly growing branch; in the one exception, the fastest growing branch in the SPIOER series is ranked second in the Soviet data. Moreover, in nearly every case the slowest growing branch in one set of indexes matches either the slowest or next slowest in the other. The largest divergence in rankings occurs during the 1950s, the smallest deviation during the most recent quinquennium. Since the beginning of the 1960s, the major incongru- ities have involved construction materials and machin- ery. The official series generally ascribe a higher rank to these two branches. In the case of construction materials, double-counting seems to have increased over the years, causing the growth of gross value of construction materials measured by the official data to be more rapid than our estimated growth of output. The increase in double-counting results partly from a conscious drive to “industrialize” construction. (See earlier discussion.) The machinery anomaly occurs because machinery is probably the branch most susceptible to the problems of new-product pricing. The official machinery index becomes an uncertain amalgamation of constant prices and current prices—the latter tending to rise ” Sec John E. Freund, Modern Elementary Statistics, (3rd Edition; Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), pp. 364-366. over time. The official machinery index inflated by so- called new product prices grows more rapidly than the SPIOER output indexes, so machinery tends to rank higher in the official series. Plausible Elimination of Inflated Growth. The offi- cial indexes are unacceptable because of the twin biases of new-product pricing and double-counting that exaggerate growth according to most Western observers and even some Soviet ones. If the SPIOER indexes are to be plausible measures of industrial growth, the difference between the SPIOER and official rates should be largest for those branches of industry most susceptible to upward bias—machinery, chemicals, and construction materials. The average annual rates of growth for both the official and SPIOER series are shown in table 8 for each quin- quennial period since 1950. The SPIOER growth rate is less than the official rate in each comparison period for total industry and for the individual branches with the exception of fuels ( 1956-60 and 1976-80) and processed food ( 1951-55 and 1956-60). The largest reductions in growth occur in those industries with the most severe new product pricing and double-counting problems: machinery, chemicals, and construction materials (table 9). All of these tests of SPIOER’s consistency with the official index have considered only multiyear periods. A year-by-year comparison for total industry (table 10 and figure 6) shows that the SPIOER growth rate is less than the official rate for every year. Thus, to the extent that the SPIOER methodology is designed to avoid the growth distortions in the official series, it seems to do so. In most cases the rate of growth measured by SPIOER falls below the rate claimed in the official Soviet measures. Moreover, SPIOER reduces the rate of growth most in those branches-—machinery, chemicals, and construction materials—most afflicted by new-product pricing and increased double-counting. Consistency of Growth Trends. A third consistency test compares the aggregate and branch growth trends measured by the SPIOER and official indexes. The SPIOER indexes should agree in general with the 200 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.