USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and Development, 1950-80

Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
$¢=1ter.$.\-Pvlis*d._$@rvisea»..1970-.-
Milton”
Rubles
4,044.4 B
307.4 b
375.01’
Total services
Less sales to enterprises
Less 95 percent of the housing services sold to
?I‘}.FLPEi?_°§
Plus 96 percent of the materials used in
tailoring of clothing
1,003.1 °
Plus 96 percent of the materials used in 115.4 C
tailori_ng of knitwear
Equals consumer purchases of services
8 Narkhoz 1972, p. 621.
b Estimated on the basis of percentage data given for the RSFSR in
V. 1. Dmitriev, Metodologieheskiye osnovy prognozirovaniya sprosa
na bylovyye uslugi, 1975, p. 98 and ruble values in Narkhoz RSFSR
1972, pp. 401-402.
C Materials are assumed to constitute halfof total sales approximate-
ly the ratio for earlier years shown by data in Narkhoz I968, p. 664
and Narkhoz 1969, p. 660. Enterprise sales are calculated at 4
percent of enterprise purchases of tailoring services, the share that
can be derived from Dmitriev’s data.
4,480.7
share during 1966-72, using data on total sales given in
Narkhoz I972, p. 621 and similar tables in Narhozy
for subsequent years. The share was assumed to
remain unchanged after 1976. The share estimated for
that year (16.9 percent) accords well with a Soviet
statement that the share was almost 18 percent in
1975.” Because of a change in the way data were
reported, use of this procedure for years after 1976
necessitated adding materials used in repair of dura-
bles and of housing to the published totals; these were
estimated to be half of the totals, their shares in 1975-
76.
2. These values in current and constant prices are used I
to splice together an index in constant prices for 1966-
80. ,
3. The index for 1960-65 is based on constant price l
values given in L.A. Bobrov, N.V. Gukov, and K.S.
Gulevich, E konomika bytovogo obsluzhivaniya nase—
Ieniya, 1971, p. 27.
4. Data in current prices for the RSFSR, cited in Ibid.,
p. 24 for 1958-62 were used to obtain an index for
1958-60. For 1956-58 the annual growth rate is based
on constant price data for the RSFSR, given in L.A.
Bobrov, E konomicheskiye problemy bytovogo 0bsluz—
hivaniya naseleniya, 1978, p. 58. An annual growth of
10 percent was assumed for 1950-55, the rate reported
for 1950-54 in Bobrov, et al, 1971, p. 23.
"’ N.V. Gukov, Ekonomika, organizatsiya i planirovaniye mater- _
ial ‘no-tekhnicheskogo snabzheniya predpriyatiy bytovogo 0bsluzh1-
vaniya, Moscow, 1977, p. 14.
Privately-supplied services. The growth rates of these
services during 1959-1970 are based on data for the
RSFSR given in V.I. Dmitriev, op. cit., p. 45. For
1950-58, the 1959 value was assumed. The level in
1970 was assumed the same in all following years, on
the reasoning that the fast growing supplies of state
services would tend to crowd out private services, given
the generally hostile official attitude toward them,
even though money incomes continued to rise rapidly.
There are no other data on the trend in the supply of
these services.
'
I
Recreation. Scope and Coverage. As defined here, the
sector encompasses activities providing entertainment
and recreation services to the population that are
largely paid for out of household incomes. Conceptu-
ally, the sector includes both public and private
purveyors of entertainment and recreational services,
such as movies, theater, ballet, concerts, circuses,
sports, vacation resorts, and lodging facilities. There is
no direct counterpart of this sector in the Soviet
classification of economic activities; rather, the sector
encompasses “art”, a component of the category
“culture and art,” “sanitoria and resorts” and “sports
and physical culture organizations,” both components
of “health and physical culture”; and “hotels,” a
component of “housing-communal economy and ev-
eryday services.” (See Metodicheskiye ukazaniya,
1974, pp. 762, 764, 767.) The categories in US
national accounts that would be encompassed in
“Recreation” are: motion pictures, amusements and
recreational services n.e.c., and hotels and other lodg-
ing places.
The index used to measure the activity of the sector is
a weighted aggregate of three sub-indexes: “entertain-
ment,” “resorts” and “leisure.” The first reflects the
activities of movies, theaters, sports, and other enter-
tainment enterprises. The second represents the ac-
tivities of vacation resorts, which are publicly operat-
ed and heavily subsidized in the USSR. The third is
intended to represent recreation in the form of travel,
not yet common in the USSR. Available data do not
permit satisfactory measurement of these diverse ac-
tivities. Neither expenditure data nor price deflators
are available for developing the deflated expenditure
series that are employed to measure comparable
activities in US national accounts. As a substitute,
several physical series were selected to represent the
various types of activities and aggregated with 1970
348 '
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421