USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and Development, 1950-80

Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
than 10 or 20 years ago and reliability may have
improved, many gaps remain. Estimates must be
made, especially for agricultural products used in the
production process. The accuracy of important series
is also questionable. For example, statistics on private
sector production, which are based on sampling, prob-
ably contain a considerable margin of error, with
particular consequences for the measurement of out-
put in the livestock sector. Further reducing reliability
of estimates of net output in the livestock sector is the
scarcity of published feed statistics which, in any case,
are believed to be less reliable than official commodity
output data. Deliberate falsification is another source
of diminished reliability in agricultural statistics.
Grain output statistics for the early 1950s published
nearly a decade later almost certainly reflect deliber-
ate understatement of the crop. Examples of recent
falsification can also be found. Because most recent
falsification appears to originate at lower levels in the
reporting process, it is unclear how it impinges on the
overall aggregate data.
Soviet gross output statistics also include a large
element of waste. For example, there is considerable
evidence to suggest that the usable quantities of grain,
sugarbeet, potato, vegetable, fruit, sunflower seed,
and egg production are smaller than official produc-
tion statistics report. Moreover, standard weight of
these commodities may be even less. Adjusting for
waste is very difficult because of the shortage of data.
We confine our deductions for waste and losses to
grain and sunflower seed output, where we believe
data exist to make such adjustments feasible. The
waste in sugarbeet production is eliminated by use of
procurement statistics—which are reported in stan-
dard weight. Failure to deduct for waste elements in
other crops is potentially the most serious cause of
overstatement of net output in the CIA index. How-
ever, we adopted the policy of not imposing arbitrary
adjustments on official Soviet data where no informa-
tion exists on which to base such adjustments. To the
extent that these adjustments are proportionately
constant over time, the trend is not distorted.
Because of these and other deficiencies in available
Soviet statistics, we believe our index is a more
reliable measure of trends in agricultural production
than of levels of output. In this context it is a more
reliable indicator of the change over a period of years
than of changes between any two consecutive years.
The CIA index shows net output growing more
rapidly in the 1950s and slowing steadily during the
1960s and 1970s. This trend is clearly seen in output
of the livestock sector. Crop output grew more rapidly
in the 1960s than in the 1950s but growth fell to rates
below either of these periods in the 1970s. The rapid
growth of the livestock sector in the 1950s caused the
share of livestock output in total net production to
increase from 45 to 54 percent between 1950 and
1960. Since 1960 share of livestock output in net
agricultural production has remained unchanged.
Average Annual Percentage
Rates of Growth
1951-60 1961-70 1971-79
Total output 4.3 3.7 0.9
Crop production 2.6 3.7 0.7
Livestock production 6.1 3.7 1.0
We applied several sensitivity tests to the index to
assess changes that would be caused by different
discounts for waste, different (1960) price weights,
and different approaches to valuing feed and livestock
inventory. None of the tests changed average annual
growth of total output for the 1951-79 period by more
than one-tenth of one percentage point. The livestock
index was most affected by the use of 1960 prices
while the crop index was most altered by removing the
discounts on grain and sunflower seed. Because 1970
prices are relatively more favorable to livestock pro-
ducts than 1960 prices, the switch to 1960 prices
caused the largest shift in the shares of total output
originating in the crop and livestock sectors.
We compared the CIA index to three other indexes of
Soviet agricultural output. Surprisingly, for the 1960s
and 1970s, growth rates of total output calculated
from these indexes differ by less than half a percent-
age point, although the indexes themselves vary wide-
ly in coverage and weighting:
~ The FAO index incorporates a recently revised
methodology and thus covers only 1966 forward; it
is based on a large sample.
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Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421