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 Part I Results and Analysis “ Soviet Economic Growth in Perspective National economic accounts constructed for the Sovi- et Union along conventional Western lines confirm that the Soviet economy has experienced rapid growth since 1950. The output of the Soviet Union in 1980 was about four times the level in 1950 (figure 1), the result of an average annual growth rate of 4.7 percent. Changes in Soviet Growth Since 1950 The pace of advance over this 30-year period, howev- er, has not been steady. In fact, annual rates of growth have been characterized by both wide year-to- year swings and a pronounced downward trend (figure 2). Despite this volatility, an absolute fall in GNP from one year to the next——that is, a negative growth rate—has been extremely rare." The downward trend shows up clearly in average annual rates of GNP growth for each of the five-year plan periods between 1950 and 1980: e . Five-Year Period Average Annual Percentage Growth 5.5 5.9 5.0 5.2 3.7 2.7 1951-55 1956-60 1961-65 1966-70 Q71-75 1976-so These data suggest that the Soviet economy has been in a strong growth slide since the late 1960s, and that " All of the results presented here are in terms of 1970 factor-cost prices unless otherwise stated. Part II discusses the rationale for using these synthetic prices. " The single occurrence is 1963 when an enormous reduction in the inventory of livestock following a disastrous harvest drove the growth rate down to -1.1 percent. This decline is probably exaggerated because the livestock index uses an average value per head and most of the animals which were slaughtered in 1963 were relatively low-valued young livestock. 15 Figure 1 Growth of Soviet GNP Index: l970= 100 170” -7 i 120 -- 100*- 890%- go __ H]__ 2o_ 2 0 1950 55 60 65 ‘I0 15 60 the average growth rate in the late 1970s was barely half the rate of 10 years earlier.“ The wide year-to-year fluctuations in Soviet growth are due primarily to swings in agricultural production. Agriculture still represents a large part of the Soviet " Conventional average annual rate-of-growth calculations are sub- ject to potential distortion if either of the end years is abnormal. Alternative calculations based on procedures developed by Boris Pesek, “Economic Growth and its Measurement," Economic Devel- opment and Cultural Change 9, April 1961, pp. 295-315 to reduce this source of distortion yield results which show only small differences in the rates of growth calculated above. The Pesek average annual growth rates for the five-year periods listed in the tabulation above are: 1951-55, 5.5; 1956-60, 5.8; 1961-65, 4.8; 1966-~70, 5.1; 1971-75, 4.0; and 1976-80, 2.6 percent per year. 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.