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 sector which produces substantial quantities of vege- tables and may well feed some of the surplus. Vegeta- bles, however, are a small component of feed; error here does not have a significant impact on the overall index movement.” Whole milk fed to livestock can be estimated with a greater degree of confidence. Data for’ whole milk fed on state and collective farms were published for a number of years. An occasional source has noted how much whole milk is fed by the private sector, usually in percentage terms. Finally, two sources have pro- vided benchmark data on total quantities of whole milk fed.” Although estimates of whole milk fed can be made with acceptable confidence, the problem of accounting for skim milk fed remains. Roughly 60 percent of total milk production is purchased by the state; about one-half of that is used for manufacture of butter. While some of the resulting fluid skim milk is dried, much of it is returned to farms for use as feed.“ In a sense, this can be considered intrasector use since the chief criterion determining prices paid to farms for milk is butterfat content, not fluid quanti- ties, and the prices paid by farms for the returned skim milk are negligible.” At any rate, we do not include an estimate of skim milk fed, although an average of 27.5 million tons of skim milk were reported fed during 1961-70.“ Any resulting bias is small; an arbitrary calculation incorporating an esti- mate of skim milk fed had almost no effect on the total estimated value of feed fed. Hatching eggs. In addition to estimating feed used in the production of livestock output, we also deduct for hatching eggs. These eggs, which amount to about 5 percent of all eggs produced, are required for hatching to produce poultry for meat and to increase poultry flocks. Few official Soviet data are available on the ” To test the sensitivity of the index, the quantities of estimated vegetables fed were arbitrarily doubled. The change in value of all feed fed was negligible. " See Appendix Table C-10. " State farms, collective farms, and other state agricultural enter- prises, selling milk to the state, have the right to receive skim milk according to norms set by the Councils of Ministers of the union republics. These norms differ according to republic and to type of farm. A.F. Bochalin and G.M. Rogozin, Spravochnik pa zakupkam produktov zhivotnovodstva, Moscow, 1974, pp. 179-183. ” Farms are charged 10 rubles per ton. Ibid., p. 179. °‘ USDA, ERS Foreign 355, Feed Balances for the USSR, (undated), p. 20. number of eggs used for hatching. The most recent Soviet statement, however, is consistent with our estimates.” Our estimate is based on the increase in poultry flocks from year to year and the relationship between poultry meat output and the number of birds necessary to produce that quantity of meat. An allowance is made for mortality in young chicks and for eggs that fail to hatch. Hatching and mortality rates can be estimated from Soviet sources.” Al- though the level of losses from both sources is higher than in the United States,” we assume it is reasonable since the literature contains frequent references to problems in poultry management.‘°° Hatching eggs are a relatively minor item in the index and errors here are not significant. No attempt is made to construct an egg balance to test the validity of the estimates. C. Testing the Estimates of Seed and Feed We tested our estimates of seed and feed against the Soviet input-output tables for 1966 and 1972. We compared the shares of gross output going to seed and feed use in our index with the shares shown by the input-output tables.“" Because the Soviet tables meas- ure gross output and value commodities produced and used within the sector at cost ‘°’ some adjustments had to be made to our index to achieve comparability. For the years 1966 and 1972, we valued all seed and feed produced in the crop sector at cost.“" Values at cost are included in output and in totals for feed use. We converted the CIA index of net crop production to a ” In May 1979, an official of the Ministry of Procurement stated that the number of eggs used for incubation amounts to about 3 billion eggs for the USSR as a whole (ZhurnaIist, no. 5, 1979, pp. 41-43). Our estimate for 1978 is 3.2 billion. " See I.N. Zamyslov, Ekonomicheskaya otsenka otrasley zhiv0tno- yodstva, Moscow, 1973, p. 91; also, Spravochnik: promyshlennoye ptitsevodstvo, Moscow, 1971, pp. 48-116. ” USDA, Agricultural Statistics 1978, Washington D.C., 1978, pp. 403, 414. '°° See, for example, Finansy SSSR, no. 11, 1973, p. 28. - '°' Data in the 1966 and 1972 input-output tables were converted to 1970 prices using indexes developed by Vladimir Treml. (See V.G. Treml, ed., Studies in Soviet Input-Output Analysis, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972, pp. 218, 219, 272.) "" Yu. E. Gaabe et al., Statistika seI'skogo khozyaystva, Moscow, 1971, p. 228. ‘°’ This calculation does not include milk used for feed or eggs for hatching. 274 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.