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 Presumably, an index based on housing space alone understates the real gains by failing to capture quali- tative improvements. However, there is little evidence to show that the physical quality of housing construc- tion per se in the USSR has improved much over the years. Although the average size of a dwelling unit increased between 1950 and 1978-by 17 percent for public housing and 77 percent for private housing (Narkhoz I970, p. 541; Narkhoz 1978, pp. 393, 395), urban housing remains crowded. The number of new dwelling units built, however, has failed to keep up with the number of new families formed. As a consequence, many families and single persons must share living quarters. Morton has estimated that in 1970 there were 1.23 households per dwelling unit, a rough measure of the extent of overcrowding.” Also, urban families often must share kitchens and baths with other families—some 30 percent do, according to a recent Soviet source.“ While state urban housing has been increasingly provided with amenities— baths, hot water, plumbing and electricity—most rural housing and probably some private urban hous- ing still lack all of them except electricity. Most of this aspect of improvement in housing conditions is captured in the index for utilities. The diverse considerations discussed suggest that no adjustment to the housing index needs to be made for quality change. Probably the largest element in im- provement of housing conditions for the individual under Soviet conditions is simply more space, which the index measures when expressed per capita. Weights. The weight for housing is the sum of (1) cash rents paid by tenants in urban public housing, (2) im- puted rents at the state urban public rate per square meter for owner-occupied urban private and all rural housing, and (3) expenditures by tenants and owners for current repair of housing. The derivation of the weight is described in CIA, GNP I970, p. 41. The average state rental rate was obtained from a Soviet source: use of that rate for imputation to owner- occupied housing was considered appropriate. Al- though the average quality of private housing con- struction is perhaps lower than for state housing, the average new privately built unit has been appreciably larger than the average state unit since 1960. More- over, the state rental rate covers only about one third of total maintenance costs. ” JEC, 1979, p. 797. “ A. Andreev, Housing, Moscow, Novosti Press, 1976, pp. 14-15. Index. The index used to measure housing services is an index of total living space, computed as the sum of separate estimates for midyear stocks of urban and rural housing, respectively. The estimates are based on data regularly published in annual statistical hand- books (e.g., Narkhoz 1977, p. 415). Although urban stocks are reported directly, rural stocks are not. They can be estimated quite satisfactorily, however, from a Soviet estimate of the stock in 1959, relevant official data bearing on changes in the stock via new con- struction and transfers to urban stocks, and an as- sumption about retirement rates. The sources and methodology for deriving the total stocks are de- scribed in detail in Willard S. Smith, “Housing in the Soviet Union: Big Plans, Little Action,” in JEC, 1973, pp. 419-422. This source gives the estimates for 1950, 1955-71; estimates for 1951-54 were interpolated. Estimates for 1972-80 were obtained by the same methodology with data given in Narkhoz 1975, pp. 570, 576, 578, and for subsequent years in compara- ble tables in the respective annual Narkhozy. Utilities. Scope and Coverage. The sector comprises household public utilities— electricity, gas, and cen- tralized supply of heat and hot water, cold water and sewage disposal. The index, a composite of three series expressed in physical units, is designed to measure household outlays on these services in real terms. The sector is defined in the same way as the Soviet category “communal payments,” (Met0diches— kiye ukazaniya, 1969, p. 535) except that outlays on hotels and dormitories, included there, are classified in recreation and in housing in the GNP accounts. As defined here, the sector is essentially the same as the “household utilities” component of the sector “household operations” in US national accounts for personal consumption. The procedure in the US is to measure real consumption of utilities by deflating money expenditures by appropriate price indexes. Lack of data precludes this approach for the USSR However, the Soviets claim that basic utility charges have not changed in recent decades. The coverage of the utilities index is essentially complete. The 1970 weights for the three sub-indexes are based on data given in a Soviet source. Although the sub-indexes are based on physical series (kilowatt-hours of electricity, cubic meters of gas, square meters of state urban public housing stock), they are considered suitable as measures of real consumption trends. Quality changes are not important in this sector. The change in the urban public housing stock was selected to move the expenditure weight for centralized heat, water and 344 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.