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 Summary of Differences in the - Soviet and US GNP Accounts As discussed above, the structural characteristics of the Soviet economy have made it necessary to con- struct a set of GNP accounts that differ somewhat from the US accounts. In addition, the lack of data forces some simplification and consolidation of the Soviet accounts as compared with the US accounts. This section summarizes the structure of our Soviet GNP accounts and the differences between the Soviet and US accounts. Three interrelated accounts comprise our Soviet GNP accounting system. The first is the household account. It enumerates the various incomes and outlays, in- cluding imputed, of private households. The house- hold sector is defined to include all activity by households. That is, investment and current produc- tion activity are included as well as consumption and transfer payments. The second account shows the incomes and outlays of the public sector. Because of lack of data, we are unable to differentiate between government final ex- penditures and production activities. As a result, public-sector outlays include government administra- tive expenditures as well as investment by kh0zras- chet enterprises. Similarly, public-sector incomes in- clude tax payments to the budget as well as retained earnings of khozraschet enterprises and kolkhozy. The third account is the consolidated GNP account. It includes the incomes and expenditures resulting from current production activity. The various transfer pay- ments between the household and public sectors are excluded since they do not represent expenditures for goods and services. All of the incomes and outlays are derived from the relevant portions of the household and public-sector accounts. The household and public-sector income and outlay accounts for 1970 are presented in appendix D. The GNP account is discussed in more detail below. The US GNP accounts consist of five accounts. The first account shows personal incomes and outlays. It resembles the Soviet household income and outlay 33 account presented above. The main differences be- tween the accounts are the explicit inclusion of agri- cultural income in kind and private investment in the Soviet account. Agricultural income in kind is includ- ed in the US account, but its importance is small and it does not appear as a separate item. Private invest- ment in the Soviet Union consists of private housing construction and the net addition of livestock to private herds. In the US accounts, these investment activities are considered part of the business sector and are included in gross private business investment. The second US account shows government incomes and outlays. Because of the wide scope of Soviet Government activity and the lack of data to make adjustments, the Soviet GNP accounts merge the equivalent of the business sector with the government sector into an aggregate public sector. In particular, it is not possible to quantify separately government- financed investment and enterprise-financed investment. The third US account is foreign trade. Foreign trade in the Soviet Union is a state monopoly and cannot be separated from the public sector for accounting pur- poses. Foreign trade in the Soviet accounts is, there- fore, shown as a net item in public-sector outlays. The fourth US account shows savings and investment. This account does not exist in the Soviet accounts because of the problem of separating enterprise in- vestment from government investment. The fifth US account shows consolidated GNP as the sum of the relevant parts of the other four accounts. Valuation ‘ As is widely recognized, Soviet prices differ markedly in concept from Western scarcity prices. Accurate measurement of the growth of production potential requires the use of prices that come as close as possible to the theoretical standard--that is, the prices of any two products should be proportional to the marginal rate of transformation between the two 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.