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 Indexes. Personnel services. The index for personnel services is based on total manhours worked in “health and physical culture.” The manhour series for 1950- 1976 is presented and described in Stephen Rapawy, Foreign Economic Report No. 10, 10c. cit., p. 6'0, and extended to 1980 by him. It was not possible to remove manhours worked in sports organizations and vacation resorts from the series. There are no data with which to adjust the series either for changes in the educational quality of the labor force or for changes in the skill mix. However, the number of “middle medical personnel”—nurses, feldshers, medi- cal technicians and the like-—has increased faster since 1950 then has the number of doctors. Average life expectancy at birth in the USSR did not change between 1960-61 and 1971-72, when the publication of such data was halted. Life expectancy probably has declined since then, because infant mortality rates and death rates for adult males have been rising since 1969.” Other current purchases. The index of other current purchases is obtained by a procedure similar to that used for education. The derivation is as follows: (0) Other current purchases in current prices (1) Data on total non-investment outlays for health financed from union republic budgets are available for 1950-57 and 1960-75, with a distribution by type of expenditure. To obtain “other current purchases” in each year, the sum of outlays on wages and social insurance, equipment, and capital repair was deduct- ed from total non-investment outlays, and fees paid by parents were added. The values for “other current purchases" so obtained are then expressed as percent- ages of total non-investment outlays. (2) Almost four-fifths of total expenditures on health is financed from republic budgets. To obtain values for “other current purchases” for the USSR as a whole the percentages derived in step (1) were multi- plied by the values for total non-investment outlays financed from the state budget (union and republic budgets). This step assumes that the distribution of expenditures by object is the same in both types of budgets. The distributions were quite similar in 1950- 57, the only years when such data for both budgets are available. " Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, op. cit., pp. 1-8. (3) The data for steps (1) and (2) are found in the following sources for 1950-75: Raskhody, pp. 71-72, 76. Gosbyudzhet I966, pp. 57, 90, 94. Gosbyudzhet I972, pp. 62, 95, 99. Gosbyudzhet 1976, pp. 60, 92, 96. For years after 1975, data on total non-investment outlays for health financed from the state budget are given in the annual statistical handbooks, e.g., Nark- hoz 1978, p. 536. The percentage share of “other current purchases” in the total was assumed to remain at the 1975 level: the share changed little in 1966-75. A small amount of current expenditures for health care is known to be financed from sources other than the state budget (funds of enterprises and trade unions, mainly). There are no data with which to take such expenditures into account in constructing the indexes. (b) Price index “Other current purchases” by institutions classified in the health sector encompass a wide variety of items. The most important one is food, which in the expendi- tures in republic budgets made up an estimated 32 percent of the total in 1970; the remainder consisted of medicines (26 percent), bedding and uniforms (8 percent), services and miscellaneous outlays (22 per- cent), and a variety of items related to office and housekeeping expenses (12 percent). The price index used to deflate this mix of expenditures is the same as that used to deflate a similar group of outlays of educational institutions. The considerations leading to this choice are similar to those set forth above in the discussion of the price deflator for other current outlays in education. Like schools and kindergartens, hospitals, rest homes, and children’s nurseries pur- chase a substantial part of their supplies at retail outlets, particularly food. According to data in Vest stat, No. 5, 1971, pp. 34, 36, compared with data in Gosbyudzhet 1972, pp. 95, 99, these organizations purchased nearly all of their food from retail outlets and a significant share of other purchases.~ The description and sources for the price deflator are given above in the discussion of the index for education. 352 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.