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 enterprises, the government, and kolkhozy for ma- chinery and equipment, construction-installation work, design work, and other capital outlays, and also investment by private households for housing. New fixed investment, as defined in the reconstructed GNP accounts for the USSR, also includes net additions to livestock, which are part of inventory investment in the US accounts. In contrast to the United States, the Soviets include the cost of installing machinery in construction expenditures. These expenses would be part of investment in machinery in the United States. Because of the different scope of government activity in the Soviet Union, government expenditures are treated somewhat differently than in US GNP. The Soviet Government provides a wide range of consumer services without charge. Government current expendi- tures for health, education, and recreational services are classified here as consumption rather than as government expenditures. The government, through the state budget, also purchases a large share of the investment goods and distributes them to various organizations. These expenditures are treated as in- vestment rather than as government expenditures. Investment in the US accounts includes only private investment; government investment is included in government expenditures. Included in government expenditures for the USSR are current outlays for government administrative services, research and de- velopment, and a part of defense expenditures. Gov- ernment administrative services in turn consist of outlays on cultural activities, municipal services, civil- ian police, general agricultural programs, forestry, and state administration and the administrative or- gans of social organizations. The second basis of classifying GNP is by type of income. This approach is not used in computing the growth of real GNP, but is used to construct the base- year GNP weights. The principal types of household incomes are state wages and salaries, kolkhoz money wage payments, net income from sales of farm prod- ucts, consumption in kind of private agricultural production, earnings from private services, net rent from owner-occupied housing, and net income from construction of private housing. The principal types of income in the public sector are retained earnings, 31 charges for special funds, taxes, depreciation, subsi- dies (as negative income), deductions from profits, and other payments to the budget. The third basis of calculating GNP is by sector of origin, aggregating the income earned in each sector of production activity. The classification of the pro- duction of goods and services conforms to Soviet definitions: industry, construction, agriculture, trans- portation, communications, trade, and services. Indus- try is further broken down into ll subsectors and services into nine. Military personnel and a small “other branches” sector complete the sectors of origin. The full list of sectors is shown in figure 9. Each type of income earned in 1970 is allocated among the sectors of origin. The values assigned to each sector are then summed to form the 1970 weights for each sector. Each sector weight is then multiplied by a matching volume index to derive the estimated growth of real GNP. Production Boundaries. The definition of a final good or service is not always clear in national income accounting. The main source of uncertainty is wheth- er government expenditures should be considered final or intermediate output. The decision in Western practice has been to declare all government purchases of goods and services to be final output. The more extensive scope of government activity in the USSR makes definition of final output still more difficult. One major problem concerns science expenditures. In the United States, research and development is large- ly financed by private corporations, and their expendi- tures are considered intermediate purchases. The research and development funded by governments is considered final output, being treated as purchases from the various industries that perform research and development on government contract or as direct purchases of materials and wages of government employees. Accordingly, in the US accounts there is not a separate comprehensive account for research and development expenditures. In the Soviet Union, most science expenditures are funded by the govern- ment, and science is considered a separate sector. For practical reasons, then, all Soviet science expenditures 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.