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.
“Cooper”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 managerial incentives, employee welfare, and other purposes. Indeed, some of the incentive funds are considered to be labor payments in GNP accounting rather than profits. Although khozraschet enterprises normally are ex- pected to be profitable, many cannot be so under existing prices. For example, many meat and milk processing enterprises must be subsidized heavily because the government has repeatedly raised pro- curement prices for many agricultural products while holding their retail prices constant.“ Budget Institutions. A budget institution receives the funds necessary for its current operations from the state budget and returns any receipts accruing from its operations to the budget. Budget institutions tend to be organizations conducting government adminis- trative operations or providing services to the popula- tion at little or no direct charge. Government adminis- tration is carried out by organizations such as the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the Central Statistical Administration, the Ministry of Defense, and municipal government organizations. Organiza- tions producing consumer services include the health and education ministries, which collect only modest fees, and the municipal service organizations, some of which are expected to collect sufficient fees to offset most of their current expenses. In general, the accounts of budget institutions are less detailed than those of khozraschet enterprises. In particular, depreciation allowances are not charged as a current expense. The Narkhoz, therefore, does not include depreciation of the capital stock of budget institutions in its depreciation data. Budget institutions play a large role in the Soviet economy. According to Soviet capital stock data, budget institutions possessed capital valued at 102.4 billion rubles on 1 January 1973, 10 percent of the total. It is likely that 20 to 25 percent of the labor force is employed in budget institutions, although exact data are not available. The borderline between " See Vladimir G. Treml, Agricultural Subsidies in the Soviet Union, US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Foreign Economic Report No. 15, Washington, D.C., 1978, for estimates of the size, growth, and distribution of this subsidy. budget and khozraschet enterprises has been a shift- ing one, but there has been a long-run tendency to increase the sphere of khozraschet enterprises in order to achieve greater control and efficiency. Collective Farms. In the USSR the collective farm, or kolkhoz, is part state and part cooperative. The land is state owned but given rent free to the kolkhoz. Members of the collective supposedly elect the direc- tor, and the net proceeds from farm activities are distributed to the members. In fact, the kolkhoz is now very similar to a state farm, or sovkhoz. The director is for all practical purposes appointed by the state, the state assigns a production and procurement plan, and the kolkhoz member is now guaranteed payment for his labor under a wage system like that of state farms. For accounting purposes, however, kolkhozy present several problems. Financial data in the Narkhoz and other sources tend to report only on state organiza- tions, omitting kolkhoz statistics. Kolkhoz accounts, therefore, have to be compiled from scattered sources. For example, earnings are retained and used for investment but are not included in Soviet data on profits. In addition, kolkhozy perform a considerable amount of industrial and construction work that is difficult to quantify. As a result, our estimate of agricultural value added is probably overstated somewhat. Private Households. The final accounting unit in the reconstructed GNP accounts for the Soviet Union is the private household. Private citizens carry out pro- duction, consumption, and investment activities. Their production is centered in agriculture, housing, and other services. In agriculture, production from private plots is sold and consumed in kind. Households con- tribute to the construction component of GNP by sector of origin through private housing construction, and they provide numerous services, including repair and personal care, education, health, recreation, and housing repair services. The operation of owner- occupied housing is included in the housing sector. 28 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 above. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.