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 17 Comparison of Growth of Quantity and Value Series Within Branches of Industry Average Annual Percent 1951-55 1956-60 1961-65 1966-70 1971-75 1976-79 Wood, pulp, and paper Quantity series 7.0 5.0 1.8 1.9 1.3 —2.6 Official value series 18.1 17.8 10.4 9.1 8.8 4.3 Chemicals and petrochemicals Quantity series 1 1.4 10.2 11.8 8.9 8.4 3.3 ifficial value series 20.8 19.4 16.1 9.7 11.7 6.0O Light industry Quantity series 9.3 5.9 3.2 4.9 2.3 1.7 Official value series 13.4 7.6 1.2 12.2 3.5 4.5 Consumer durables -9 Quantity series 17.7 11.5 9.4 7.6 14.8 2.1 Official value series 17.7 9.9 9.7 12.9 10.5 8.4 Producer durables Quantity series 10.8 12.2 6.8 5.5 5.1 2.2 Official value series 12.9 12.5 10.9 10.0 11.0 8.4 Whatever the reason, a wide disparity in growth rates clearly exists between the two types of subsamples in the producer durables index. I-low the underlying biases might affect the overall machinery index and the industrial index can only be judged by some fairly arbitrary sensitivity testing (table 19). Six different assumptions regarding the bias in the producer durables sample are tested. In each case, we assume that the SPIOER growth rates are biased for specific reasons and reestimate growth taking into account the assumed adjustments. The cases tested allow for the downward biases of the quantity series, the upward biases of the value series, and combina- tions of both. The alternative assumptions are: 1. Real growth of the value series is the same as that of the quantity sample. 2. Real growth of the value series is 2 percentage points higher than that of the quantity series. 3. Real growth of the quantity series is 1 percentage point higher than the measured rate and equals the real growth of the value series. 4. Inflation in the value series is 3 percent per year. 5. The downward bias in the quantity series is 1 percentage point per year, and the upward bias in value series is 3 percentage points per year. 6. The downward bias in the quantity series is 1 percentage point per year, and real growth in the value series is 2 percentage points per year higher than the adjusted growth in the quantity series. The impact of possible biases in the producer durables sample weakens considerably at higher levels of ag- gregation. The largest discrepancy between SPIOER growth and growth of hybrid indexes (1951-79) is 2.2 percentage points for producer durables, 1.2 percent- age points for machinery, and just 0.3 percentage point for total industry. Moreover, in this case ma- chinery growth is unrealistically low compared with that in other industrial sectors. Assumptions that give a more realistic machinery growth suggest that the error introduced into SPIOER indexes by any bias in the machinery index is no larger than half that in the worst case. 216 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.