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.
“Gross”60+ pages
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. 252 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.