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.
“V.M.”23 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Table 9 Percentage Points Difference Between Official and SPIOER Average Annual Growth Rates for Industry and Branches of Industry 8 1951-55 1956-60 1961-65 1966-70 1971-75 1976-80 Total industry 2.9 2.1 2.0 2.1 1.6 1.0 Ferrous metals 1.0 1.2 0.8 0.6 1.0 0.8 Fuels 0.7 -0.4 0.2 0.7 0.1 -0.4 Electric power 1.3 1.7 0.8 1.1 0.1 0.5 Chemicals and petrochemicals 5.7 1.5 2.4 3.3 2.0 1.9 Wood, pulp, and paper 0.9 2.0 2.4 2.6 2.6 1.6 Construction materials 1.9 2.9 3.7 2.9 2.1 0.7 Machinery 7.1 6.3 5.0 4.8 3.7 2.8 Light industry 1.9 0.5 0.0 1.4 1.9 0.8 Processed food — 0.2 — 0.5 0.4 0.0 1.5 0.8 3 These numbers represent the average annual percentage rate of growth for the official series less the SPIOER rates. Thus, a positive value indicates that SPIOER has a lower growth rate, while a negative one implies the opposite. movements. Interpretation of the test results is com- plicated because growth consistency can be assessed on at least four different planes, none of which is necessarily preferred. Maximum consistency between SPIOER and the official indexes is not necessarily optimal, since a trade-off exists between the accuracy of the SPIOER indexes and their consistency with the official indexes. As the degree of SPIOER’s consisten- cy with the official indexes increases, eventually a point is reached where greater consistency implies mere replication of the growth distortions in the official indexes. A minimal interpretation of growth consistency re- quires simply that the SPIOER and official growth indexes agree on the above- or below-average years. Another interpretation of consistency is that the SPIOER and official indexes agree regarding the extremes, the periods of highest and lowest growth. A level of consistency even more difficult to achieve is that the growth rates of the SPIOER indexes and the official series move in the same direction from one period to the next. However, seeking consistency here risks forcing the inaccuracies of the official series onto the synthetic indexes. The highest degree of consisten- cy (in some cases undesirable) requires that the values of the indexed growth rates be nearly equal for a given period. Failure to ensure this highly rigid form of consistency is not critical, unless we assert that the amount of distortion in the official indexes remains unchanged from year to year. When the test results are interpreted from the stand- point of the agreement on above- and below-average years—whether the growth indexes are above or below l00—the SPIOER indexes do quite well (table 1 1). In only two out of 60 possible instances do the SPIOER and official indexes clearly disagree in assigning above- or below-average performance to a given period. In the two exceptions-—-chemicals and petrochemicals in 1966-70 and machinery in 1971- 75—on1y marginal changes in the index would remove the inconsistency. The consistency of SPIOER and official indexes with respect to the identification of the periods of hi9he$t and lowest growth is quite good. SPIOER estimates agree with the official indexes on the high growth 202 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.