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
shipped to final demand in a given sector embodies
the same value added regardless of whether the
machinery is a producer or consumer durable. Based
on this assumption, the value added for each machin-
ery type can be estimated by multiplying total sector
value added by each component’s share of deliveries
to final demand.
Some bias is introduced by determining the relative
importance of producer and consumer durables as
described above. Deliveries of many machinery sec-
tors to final demand categories other than private
consumption undoubtedly include substantial
amounts of purely military machinery; not all military
hardware is produced in the “other machinery” sector
of table B-1. This gives producer durables an exces-
sively high weight and consumer durables too low a
weight.
In the fourth step the producer and consumer dura-
bles indexes are calculated separately. Indexes of each
type are converted into value added by linking them to
the values derived in table B-1: the resulting values
are then summed for every year.
The fifth step derives the production index for civilian
machinery by using the control totals for 1972 value
added of consumer durables and producer durables in
table B-1, that is, 41,599 and 5,658 million rubles,
respectively. Applying these weights to the producer
durables and consumer durables indexes and adding
them together provide the index for civilian
machinery.
Finally, the civilian and military machinery indexes
are combined into an index of total Soviet machinery
production. The weights are obtained according to the
following procedure. The figure for military machin-
ery production in 1972 (after deducting common use
durables) is converted to value added by using the
ratio of total machinery final demand to value added
as given in the reconstructed 1972 input-output table.
The military share of value added in machinery
production in 1972 is derived by comparing this value
with total value added in the machinery branch. The
indexes of output for civilian machinery and military
machinery are then used to find the shares in the base
year, l970—for military machinery, about one-third
and for civilian machinery, about two-thirds.
244
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.