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.

Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Table 15
Gross Output and Value Added in Input-Output Tables at Constant Prices
(Average Annual Percentage Rate of Growth)
Sector 1960-66 1967-72
Gross Value
Output Added =
(percent) (percent)
Difference
(percentage
point)
Gross
Output
(percent)
Value
Added =
(percent)
Difference
(perce
point)
ntage
Metallurgy 7.4 8.3 -0.9 5.7 3.3 2.4
Coal 0.8 — 1.4 2.2 2.0 -1.0 3.0
Oil 8.6 9.8 -1.2 12.7 13.1 -0.4
Gas 17.8 17.8 0 5.6 4.9 0.7
Electric power 1 1.6 14.0 — 2.4 8.3 9.1 -0.8
Machinery _13.1 12.0 1.1 10.2 12.3 -2.1
Chemicals and petrochemicals 11.8 12.5 -0.7 9.4 9.6 -0.2
Wood products 3.8 3.2 0.6 5.3 5.0 0.3
Paper 4.3 5.2 -0.9 11.7 10.9 0.8
Construction materials 7.7
I
9.2 -1.5 7.8 7.8 0
Light industry 5.7 6.0 -0.3 7.1 8.1 -1.0
Processed food b 4.8 NMF NMF 5.2 NMF NMF
Industry without processed 7.8 7.3
food
0.5 8.2 8.5 -0.3
NMF means no meaningful figure.
3 Including amortization deductions.
bA comparison for processed food is not possible because of the
negative value added in this sector owing to heavy state subsidies.
results of this comparison (table 15) suggest that gross
output does change, for the most part, in line with
value added. In over two-thirds of the comparisons the
differences in growth rates between gross output and
value added are less than 1 percentage point. The
cases with the largest divergence in growth rates are
coal in both periods, electric power in 1960-66, and
metallurgy and machinery in 1967-72. In general,
value added tended to grow slightly slower than gross
output in the early period and faster in the later
period.
These results indicate that the assumption of a con-
stant ratio of value added to gross output should not
bias the SPIOER indexes much as measures of value
added. Moreover, in those instances of wide disagree-
ment between the gross output and value-added
growth in table 15, the explanation may lie in the
unreliability of the price deflators used for machinery
output (and input) and changes in product mix within
input-output sectors. If subsectors within any of the
18 sectors have widely disparate gross output to value-
added ratios, the growth of gross output for the full
sector need not match that of value added. SPIOER
partially circumvents the product mix problem by
disaggregating industrial production to a more de-
tailed level than represented in the 18-sector input-
output tables used by Treml and Guill. The greater
level of detail in SPIOER allows variations in the
ratio of value added to gross output at the 18-sector
level and freezes the ratio only at a more detailed
sectoral breakdown.
On balance, the effect on the SPIOER indexes of the
inability to construct true indexes of value added—a
problem that exists in the production indexes of many
211
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.