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 Weights. The weights for the four sub-indexes and for the components of the telephone indexes are the revenues for the various kinds of services provided by the Ministry of Communications (Transport i svyaz’, I972, p. 302). There are no data with which to obtain separate value weights for the individual components of the postal and radio-TV broadcasting sub-indexes. Index. The nature and sources of data for the four sub- indexes are shown below: Sector Nature of Series Sources Postal Sum of the number of letters, newspapers and magazines, par- cels, and money or- ders and pension pay- ments Transport 1' svyaz', I972, p. 274 and similar tables in Nark- hozy for subse- quent years Telegraph Number of telegrams lbid. Telephone Weighted sum of number of inter-ur- ban calls, urban sets, and rural sets Transport i svyaz ', I972, pp. 274, 283, 285 and similar tables in Narkhozy for subsequent years. Radio-TV broadcast- ing Sum of the number of radios, TV sets, and wired loudspeak- ers Transport i svyaz’, 1972, p. 292 and similar tables in Nark- hazy for subse- quent years. Repair and Personal Care. Scope and Coverage. As defined here, the sector encompasses a wide variety of personal services, the most important of which are: repair and tailoring of clothing, repair.of household appliances and automobiles; shoe repair; barbershops and beauty parlors; public baths; and photographic services. The coverage is nearly identical to that of the Soviet statistical category Bytovoye obsluzhivaniye naseleniya (“everyday servicing of the population”), except that the latter includes housing construction and repair, which is included in “housing” in the GNP accounts. In Soviet practice, these services are classi- fied partly as “productive” and partly as “non- productive,” but statistics for both groups combined are now reported regularly in the annual handbooks. The coverage of the sector is described in Met0diches- kiye ukazaniya, 1974, pp. 774-776. In US national accounts these services are classified mainly in “personal services” and “miscellaneous repair services and hand trades.” For the most part, the indexes used to measure expenditures in real terms are calculated as the deflated values of outlays in current prices. The index for “repair and personal care" is a weighted composite of separate indexes for state-supplied ser- vices and for privately supplied services. Both purport to represent the value of such services in constant I970 prices. Although the coverage of the combined index is virtually complete, the underlying data leave much to be desired. The index for state services is based on published values reported for some years in current prices and for other years in various kinds ofconstant prices. To complete the time series, use was made of growth rates for the RSFSR and various assumptions for years for which no data could be found. The series for private services relies on survey data relative to the RSFSR in I960-I971 and on assumptions about their growth in other years. The unsatisfactory state of the data is a result of the fact that state-supplied personal services were long neglected and that systematic data are not compiled on privately supplied services. Evalu- ation ofthe quality ofthe resulting index is difficult. It relies _in part on official price deflators of an unknown character. The index, as a consequence may overstate the growth of state-supplied services. On the other hand, the assumptions (and the data) on trends in private services may understate their growth. Clearly, the total supply of services has been increasing rapidly as incomes have risen. The index reflects this expected result; the degree of accuracy is hard to assess. Weights. Separate values for state and privately sup- plied services were derived for the I970 GNP weights. The value for state-supplied services was obtained as shown below: The value of private services is estimat- ed in CIA, GNP I970, p. 42, except that housing repair services are now estimated at l.07I billion rubles. (See tabulation on next page.) Indexes. State-supplied services. The construction of this sub-index entailed a series of linkages based on diverse data. l. The procedure described on the following page to obtain the value for I970 was used to obtain similar values in current prices for 1960 and 1965- I 972 and in comparable prices for I965 and I970-76. The values of sales to enterprises were estimated from the shares given in Dmitriev, op. cit., p. 98 for 1965, I970, and I972. Their share in 1965 was used for all preceding years. Extrapolation for I973-76 was made on the basis of the average annual rates of growth of their 347 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.