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.
“V.M.”23 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Our overall measure of variation is the average absolute percentage difference between the CIA index and each of the indexes being compared. The differ- ence calculation provides a l_ess ambiguous measure of variation than comparisons of growth rates for arbi- trarily chosen periods. We supplement the difference calculations with measures of variations in growth rates and structure of output. We assess differences in sample coverage, estimating procedures, and price weights. The final step in the comparisons is to construct a variant of the CIA index that matches the index being compared as closely as possible. By eliminating as many differences as possible between the indexes, we are able to identify many of the factors that cause the indexes to grow at different rates. In most cases, for example, this reconstruction can eliminate differences in the indexes caused by different price weights. Average absolute percentage difference calculations are used to determine whether the reconstruction improved the match between CIA index and the indexes being compared with it. A. The Official Soviet Index of USSR Gross Agricul- tural Output The official Soviet index measures gross output of agriculture. Products used for seed and crops fed are counted as output of the crop sector; feed _is also‘ included in the value of livestock production. Al- though the value of agricultural output is overstated in the official index, our focus is on intertemporal comparisons between the two indexes and not on the overall magnitude of production measured in rubles. To compare the CIA and Soviet indexes of agri- cultural output, both must be on either a net or gross basis. Given the lack of Soviet statistics on uses of output, we chose to convert the CIA index to a gross basis rather than to create a net output index from Soviet data. The official Soviet index in 1965 comparable prices is compared with the CIA index of net agricultural output in I970 prices and with the CIA index recon- structed to a gross output basis, weighted with Soviet 1965 comparable prices.'°° The CIA index was calcu- lated on a gross basis by adding back the value of seed and feed and by eliminating the discounts on grain and sunflower seed. Our reconstructed index is not strictly comparable to the Soviet official index, how- ever. Although the Soviet index is nominally in constant prices, it is actually a “linked” index incor- porating several sets of price weights.“° Data are not available to correct the official Soviet index for this deficiency. Furthermore, we did not allow for crops included in the official Soviet index but excluded from the CIA index. (See Table 2.) Table 9 shows that the average absolute percentage difference between the Soviet gross output index and the CIA net output index is 3.6. The difference is smaller for crops than for livestock, indicating that omissions from the CIA crop sample are not a source of serious bias in the index. Despite more similar coverage, the CIA index of livestock output is farther from the Soviet variation than is the index of crop output. The CIA measure of net output grows at approximately the same rate as the Soviet measure of gross output during the 1951-79 period, even though growth rates for crops and livestock in the two indexes do not agree well. Growth rates for total output match because differences in growth of crop and livestock indexes are offset by differences in CIA and Soviet weights used to aggregate crop and livestock output :into total agricultural production. As table 10 shows, for the past two decades crops and livestock con- _tributed equally to Soviet gross output while the CIA index (both gross and net) gave greater weight to '°° In the Soviet definition of comparable prices, marketed output is valued at actual sale prices while products used entirely within the sector are valued at cost. Private sector production that is not marketed is valued at the average price for marketed output of the particular commodity. A complete list of 1965 comparable prices used in the official Soviet index and in our reconstruction of the CIA index is found in F.E. Savitskiy et al., Spravochnik p0 planirovaniyu seI'sk0g0 khozyaystva, Moscow, I974, pp. 462-464. “° According to Soviet statistical handbooks, I950 indexes are expressed in 1926/27 prices; ‘I9-51-55 are in 1951 prices; I956-57 are in I956 prices; I958-64 are in 1958 prices; 1965-75 are in I965 prices, and since 1976, the index has been calculated in I973 prices. When a new set of price weights is introduced, the total ruble value of agricultural output is adjusted by one aggregate price index instead of a detailed set of deflators. The procedure is not equivalent to revaluing each item in the index in new prices. Trends in the official index, therefore, are affected by this imperfect transition from one set of price weights to another. 279 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.