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 Changes in Livestock Inventories. The CIA index measures the annual change in the number of cattle, hogs, sheep and goats, and poultry." Published Soviet herd statistics do not regularly include other domesti- cated animals such as camels, donkeys, and reindeer. The increase or decrease in numbers is valued at the average realized price per live animal in 1970, which is derived from the average weight of animals sold to procurement organizations in that year. We assume that the larger average weight of mature animals offsets the lower per animal weight of young animals so that the average weight for the entire herd is equal to the average weight of animals designated for slaughter. Although average animal weight changes every year, sensitivity tests presented below indicate that, for most years, the index is not much affected by failure to take this change into account. General Assessment. Sufficient Soviet data are available to assess the coverage of the CIA index relative to the more comprehensive Soviet measure of gross agricultural production." Table 2 compares the commodities in- cluded in both indexes.“ The CIA index includes the commodities shown in column one; the Soviet index includes the commodities in both columns.” Although the CIA sample seems to exclude a long list of crops, most of the excluded crops are used entirely within agriculture and are not part of output available for sale and home consumption. Crops omitted from the CIA index that are not produced for intra-agri- I cultural use include the additional technical crops such as hops, as well as flowers and decorative plants, “ The change in numbers of horses is excluded because horsesiare included in the Soviet definition of agricultural capital stock. Increments in horse inventories, therefore, are not part of current net output available for sale. " Gross output includes the value of all agricultural products and makes no deduction for agriculture’s use of its own output in the production process. " A'complete list of the commodities in the Soviet index is available in F.E. Savitskiy et al., Spravochnik po planirovaniyu sel'sk0g0 khozyaystva, Moscow, I 974, pp. 462-464. " Meat output is measured quite differently in the two indexes. In the Soviet index, output is equal to the difference in liveweight of animals at the beginning and the end of the year minus the weight of purchased animals plus the liveweight of all animals sold for slaughter. and some items of inventory change. In addition to the broader coverage shown in table 2, the Soviet index has finer detail for many of the basic commodities. For example, the CIA index is based on output of nine specific grains while the Soviet index includes I7 individual types. The CIA index accounts separately only for sunflower seed and soybeans under oilseeds; the Soviet index includes I6 individual items in this category. The coverage of the livestock sector is conceptually closer in the two indexes than that for the crop sector despite the differences in measurement of meat output. The coverage of the CIA index can also be assessed by comparing the ruble values of gross agricultural out- put as measured by the Soviet and CIA indexes. " When the two indexes of gross output are compared , the CIA index includes 90 percent of Soviet output of agriculture. Over 95 percent of livestock products and 80 percent of crop output are covered. '° The CIA index would show somewhat greater coverage of crop production if estimates of hay, pasture feed, and other forage crops had been included when converting the CIA index to a gross output basis. The comparison suggests that the CIA index has generally good coverage probably accounting for roughly 95 percent of total output net of intrafarm use of crops. B. 1970 Price Weights ’ Each commodity in the index of agricultural produc- tion is valued at the weighted average of prices paid by the USSR’s three major purchasers of farm pro- ducts in 1970. For a number of commodities, such as vegetables and meat ‘I prices received by farm produc- crs vary substantially depending on the purchaser. The largest purchasing organization is the Ministry of " To make this comparison, commodities in the CIA index on a gross basis were valued in the 1965 comparable prices used in the Soviet index. In addition, the value of seed and feed were added back to create a CIA measure of gross output. "’ A detailed discussion of the differences in the growth rates and the structure of the CIA and Soviet indexes is presented below in section VIII B. ” Prices for meat are based on procurement prices for live animals and are converted to a slaughter weight basis. See appendix B. 257 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.