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 a manual setting out their procedures in detail. The nearest thing to such a manual was prepared by the CEMA secretariat for publication by the United Nations." This document sets out only the general procedures and states that individual nations of CEMA frequently diverge from them. Various Soviet authors, including some known to hold important positions in the Central Statistical Administration, have published books on NMP. It is never clear, however, whether these books represent official state- ments or personal opinions. The lack of knowledge of Soviet NMP practices makes it difficult to know how to adjust NMP in order to reach GNP. The dividing line between NMP and GNP is not always clear, and the user of the NMP data is left to guess the correct interpretation." The third principal reason for making independent GNP estimates is that Soviet data on the real growth of NMP and sectoral output involve considerable overstatement. Soviet NMP increased 57 percent in constant prices and 51 percent in current prices from 1970 to 1979, which implies deflation in the Soviet Union since 1970." In contrast, most studies by Western scholars indicate that there is persistent inflation in the Soviet Union, both overt and re- pressed. For example, Cohn allocated the difference in the growth rates of Western estimates of Soviet GNP and Soviet NMP to differences in (1) coverage, (2) the weights assigned to each sector, and (3) sectoral growth rates. He found the latter to be the most important.“ The chief cause of the difference in sectoral growth rates in the postwar period is believed to be the Soviet method of accounting for the production of new industrial products. In constructing an output series in constant prices, a price must be imputed to products introduced after the base year. In theory, the Soviets " Basic Principles of the System of Balances of the National Economy, United Nations, New York, 1971. '1 See Abraham S. Becker, “National Income Accounting in the USSR,“ in Treml and Hardt, pp. 115-119, for a discussion of this problem. " Narkhoz I97 9, p. 405. “ Stanly H. Cohn, “National Income Growth Statistics,” in Treml and Hardt, pp. 136-137. For a recent look at inflation in general see Alec Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism, ch. 11, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1979. 13 assign each new product a price high enough to recover research, development, and introductory pro- duction costs. After these initial costs are recovered, the price of the new product is supposed to be lowered and a permanent price established. In practice, how- ever, pricing procedures are used by Soviet managers to inflate the growth of output in two ways. Often old products are altered slightly and declared to be new products with unjustifiably higher prices, and genu- inely new products are allowed to retain their intro- ductory price as a permanent price. In both cases, the unjustifiably high price is used by the Soviets as the base-year price needed for the constant-price output calculation. The impact of the new-product pricing problem will be greatest in those sectors with a high rate of innovation, primarily the machinery and chemicals branches of industry in the Soviet Union." The Plan of the Paper This paper is divided into two main parts. Part I presents and analyzes the results; detailed description of the construction of individual sector indexes is reserved for the appendixes. The first sections exam- ine the estimated growth rates for both total GNP and its principal components, the percentage distribution of GNP over time, major shifts in resource allocation, the growth of per capita consumption, and interna- tional comparisons of the growth and structure of the Soviet economy. The final sections of part I assess the accuracy and reliability of the results. Part II sets out the methodology used to construct base-year weights in factor-cost prices and the indexes of real economic activity. The methodology itself is presented in four sections: the accounting framework, the valuation problem, conversion of the 1970 GNP accounts from established prices to factor-cost prices, and the construction of constant-price activity index- es. The final section briefly describes the nature of the various end-use and sector-of-origin indexes. " See Comparing Planned and Actual Growth of Industrial Output in Centrally Planned Economies, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., 1980, p. 6; and Rush V. Greenslade, “Industrial Production Statistics in the USSR," in Treml and Hardt, pp. 181- 186, for discussions of the new-product price issue. Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Not linked to a story yet.
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.