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 fluctuations in Soviet GNP are captured fairly accu- rately in our data. The continued close relationship of both measures after 1978 suggests that our estimates of the growth rate of total GNP are accurate, and that the apparent underestimate of outlays n.e.c. after 1978 noted above results from an overestimate of other end-use components. Comparisons With Other Western Estimates A number of other estimates of Soviet GNP have been compiled by Western scholars, although none is as comprehensive or recent as those presented here. Most of these estimates concern the 1950s or early 1960s. The tabulation below compares the average annual rate of growth of total GNP derived in these other Western studies with the corresponding value derived in this study: 32 Period Other Western Studies of Soviet GNP Author Average Annual Rate of Growth (Percent) 1951-55 Bergson 7.6 5.5 1951-61 Moorsteen and 7.4 5.7 _ Powell 1951-65 Kaplan 6.3 5.5 1951-69 Cohn 5.5 5.3 1956-75 Lee 7.7 5.0 1959-64 Becker 5.8 4.8 Average Annual Rate of Growth Derived in This Study (Percent) It is readily apparent that in each case the growth rate derived in this study is lower, and in some cases the difference is considerable. The studies by Bergson, Becker, and Lee estimate the growth of GNP as the sum of end-use expenditures. About 60 percent of the “ Bergson, 1961, p. 149; Moorsteen and Powell, Soviet Capital Stock, pp. 623-624; Kaplan, Soviet Economic Growth, p. 14; Cohn, “Growth of the Soviet Economy," p. 17; W. T. Lee, “USSR Gross National Product," p. 413; and Becker, 1969, p. 128. difference between the growth rates computed by Becker and in this study arises from the lower growth rate of consumption derived here (4.7 versus 3.5 percent per year). This difference in turn results largely from Becker’s use of Soviet price indexes to deflate the retail sales data as opposed to the use of physical quantity consumption and production data in this study. Similarly, most of the difference between Bergson’s estimate and the one obtained here is the much lower growth rate of consumption derived in this study. Again, Bergson uses Soviet price indexes to deflate the retail sales component of consumption. Lee’s data are essentially in current prices and this undoubtedly accounts for most of the difference be- tween his results and those obtained here. The studies by Moorsteen and Powell, Kaplan, and Cohn all use a set of base-year, sector-of-origin weights and a set of corresponding production indexes in order to estimate the growth rate of GNP. The growth rate obtained here is lower than that of Moorsteen and Powell primarily because of different weights. The 1950 implicit weights for industry (a high-growth sector) in this study are lower and the weights for agriculture and housing (low-growth sec- tors) are higher. The Kaplan growth rate is higher mainly because industry is assigned a higher weight and the average growth rate of industry is a full percentage point higher. The Cohn growth rate is nearly the same as the one obtained here. 26 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.