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. 18 …Power, United Nations International Comparisons Project, Phase I (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) ICP…
  • p. 19 …Oleg 1-Ioeffding, Soviet National Income and Product in 1928, Columbia University Press, New York, 1954…
  • p. 21 …In theory, the Soviets " Basic Principles of the System of Balances of the National Economy, United…
  • p. 50 …Lawrence Grose, Real Output Measurement in the United States National Income and Product Accounts, US Department…
  • p. 166 …The subsidies on housing, recreation, and the press were allocated to the housing, recreation, and other…
  • p. 181 …Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 155-194; with Wade Robertson, “Industrial Production in the USSR," Soviet…
  • p. 183 …tons, square meters, units of production, or some other convention- al measure. Examples of this type…
  • p. 210 …For example, the production of commodities pub- lished in physical units includes intraplant turnover, but the…
  • p. 222 …bulbs Units Narkhoz Machine tools sector ml Meta? cutting machine tools Rubles Narkhoz Forge presses sector…
  • p. 249 …Hardt, eds., Soviet Economic Statistics, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1972 Treml and Hardt U…
  • p. 261 …Khrushchev stat- ed that “figures for average yield (of grain) which you read in the press…
  • p. 308 …central press. 8 Because the official data have again been made available to the United States…
  • p. 320 …Power, United Nations International Comparisons Project, Phase I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) ICP…
  • p. 321 …2 For details, see United Nations, Comparisons ofthe System of National Accounts and the System of…
  • p. 328 …Judging from a mass of anecdotal evidence from the Soviet press concerning the poor quality of…
  • p. 342 …Although the average size of a dwelling unit increased between 1950 and 1978-by 17 percent…
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Table 10
Difference Between Official and SPIOER
Growth Rates for Industry
Difference 1’
(percentage
point)
1951 16.4 12.2 4.2
1952 11.6 8.5 3.1
1953 12.0 9.1 2.9
1954 13.3 10.1 2.2
1955 12.5 11.0 1.5
1956 10.6 8.2 2.4
1957 10.0 7.7 2.3
1958 10.3 9.0 1.3
1959 11.4 9.3 2.1
1960 9.5 7.2 2.3
1961 9.1 6.7 2.4
1962 9.7 7.4 2.3
1963 8.1 6.0 2.1
1964 7.3 6.4 0.9
1965 8.7 6.5 2.2
1966 8.7 5.6 3.1
1967 10.0 6.9 3.1
1968 8.3 6.5 1.8
1969 7.1 5.4 1.7
1970 8.5 7.0 1.5
1971 7.7 6.1 1.6
1972 6.5 5.0 1.5
1973 7.5 5.8
A
1.7
1974 8.0 6.5 1.5
1975 7.5 6.2 1.3
1976 4.8 3.9 0.9
1977 5.7 4.0 1.7
1978 4.8 3.5 1.3
1979 3.4 3.0 0.4
1980 ¢ 3.6 2.9 0.7
= Central Statistical Agency, Narkhoz 78, 79, and 80, (Moscow:
Statistika, 1979, 80, and 81) p. 38.
b This is the annual growth rate of the official series less the SPIOER
rates. Thus, a positive value indicates that SPIOER has reduced the
growth rate while a negative one implies the opposite.
° Preliminary.
Official 1* SPIOER
(percent) (percent)
period for total industry and eight out of nine
branches and on the low growth period for all indexes.
Only a minor shift would lead to perfect consistency
at this level. A change in average growth rate of only
0.4 percentage point would bring the series for chemi-
cals into conformity on the best growth periods.
The secular consistency of SPIOER with respect to
comparable period-to-period growth trends is surpris-
ingly good. Table 12 summarizes the directional
structure of the two growth index series. A negative
sign indicates that growth has slowed while a positive
one signifies an acceleration. When both signs match
during a given period, the two indexes agree that
growth has accelerated or decelerated. Of the 50
possible comparisons between the two sets of indexes,
they agree on directional trend 45 times.“ Three of
the five inconsistencies occur in the two branches of
industry—construction materials and machinery-
with the least reliable official output indexes.
Consistent agreement on relative deviations of sub-
period growth rates from the 1950-80 average is hard
to interpret in terms of the reasonableness of the
synthetic series because relative bias in either the
official indexes or SPIOER may change. In any case
the performance of SPIOER is mixed in this sort of
comparison. In some cases—such as total industry,
electric power, ferrous metals, and fuels—agreement
is good on the pattern of growth. In others—like
wood, pulp, and paper and construction materials—
the magnitudes of growth shifts are very different in
the two series. Therefore, SPIOER gives a somewhat
different picture of the pattern of development in
these latter branches.
Consistency With Investment Series. Another way to
test the representativeness of the producer durables
sample is to compare this index with the official series
" The test treats a result of no trend in one series versus some trend
in the other as no match.
203
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.