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 Description and Evaluation of the Consumption Index The Index in Established Prices General The index of total consumptionwshown in summary form in Table 3 and in detail in Appendix A—is a weighted aggregate of separately constructed indexes for three broad categories of goods—food, soft goods, and durables and miscellaneous goods—six categories of personal services—housing, utilities, transporta- tion, communications, repair and personal care, and recreation—and two communal services education and health. The indexes for major categories, in turn, are weighted aggregates of varying numbers of com- ponent indexes. The aggregate index is a sample index based to a considerable extent on time series in physical units. The sample is large and in one way or another » represents more than 90 percent of all consumption expenditures. 'All important foods, soft goods, and durables are included, as are most personal services and all education and health services. Both the sample categories and the time series selected to represent them were severely constrained by the availability of published Soviet data. Ideally, one would like to have suitable and detailed expenditure time series and corresponding reliable price deflators. In general, the Soviet government publishes neither. Data on retail sales, regularly published in current prices with a disaggregation of several dozen groups, are flawed by the presence of sizeable residual groups of obscure content and by inclusion of sales to enterprises and sales of intermediate and investment goods that do not reflect household consumption. Retail sales data also include sales of so-called “productive” services, such as shoe repair. The data with which to remove or reclassify these various items are not available over time. Official retail price indexes are seriously defec- tive, as already noted, since they reflect official price changes only on a fixed sample of basic products; the index is, in essence, an index of prices on an official price list and not an index of prices paid by consumers for goods actually available for purchase. The Soviet government publishes neither quantities nor values for consumption in kind, a major element in total food consumption. Neither expenditures nor price indexes are available for most personal services. Official data on government outlays for education and health are in current prices, and include transfer payments and some expenditures that belong to investment rather than to consumption. In general, the Soviet Union publishes only a small fraction of the data that are required, ideally, to construct a reliable consumption index; moreover the definitions and methodologies underlying the pub- lished data are seldom available in more than cursory detail. As a result of these problems with the data, the quality of the components of the CIA indexes is uneven. Most satisfactory, perhaps, are those for food, soft goods, transportation, and communications: least satisfactory are those for durables and miscellaneous goods and for recreation. The indexes for housing and for communal services suffer from an inability to reflect improvements in quality; this shortcoming is not unique to the indexes constructed here for the USSR, however. Each of the major component index- es is evaluated below with respect to coverage and quality of the time series data and internal weights within major components. Several sources of possible bias exist. The choice of 1970 as the base year may -impart some bias to the index. In general, however, 1970 was a fairly “normal” year for consumers, in the sense that no major crop failure or other unusual event occurred. The matter of the degree of overall equilibrium in consumer goods markets is considered below. To test the effect of the choice of base year, alternative weights for major categories on a comparable basis were constructed for 1960 and 1976. Rates of growth shown by the three sets of weights do not differ much. The use of 1960 weights speeds up the index some- what, while the use of l976 weights instead of 1970 weights has a negligible impact on the index. Table 4 summarizes the growth rates given by alternative sets of weights for major categories. i The use of time series expressed in physical units may bias the index downward because of the inability to allow fully for improvements in quality. This source of bias could be significant, probably, only for footwear, hosiery, and knitwear and perhaps for education and health services. On the other hand, those series that 328 Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Not linked to a story yet.
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.