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 I-O table because relative producers’ prices are thought to be more stable over time than relative purchasers’ prices. Since Soviet I-O tables show only the productive sectors,“ while the transportation and communica- tions sectors furnished both productive (freight trans- portation) and nonproductive (passenger transporta- tion) services, these GNP sectors must be disaggregated. In addition, to obtain a value-added quadrant in producers’ prices, we must compute: (1) the implicit subsidies received and turnover taxes paid by each productive sector on its material purchases, (2) the nonproductive services purchased by each sector, and (3) the material purchases of the service sectors. These estimates are explained in more detail in appendix E. The 1970 I-O table is estimated with the help of a least squares minimization algorithm. It estimates a 1970 I-O table in producers’ prices that is as much like the actual 1972 table as possible, with the constraint that each row and column must sum to a predetermined amount. The row and column sums are determined as each sector’s gross output less, respec- tively, its value added or final demand. See appendix E for further discussion of the algorithm and its rationale. Many of the steps taken to compute the 1970 I-O table in producers’ prices are part of the conversion to factor-cost prices, notably the elimination of turnover taxes and subsidies on final goods and services. The remaining steps eliminate the rest of turnover taxes and subsidies and replace profits with a uniform capital charge. In our earlier publication on the 1970 GNP accounts, the uniform capital charge was set at 12 percent of the sum of fixed and working capital. The present report follows the work of Brown, Hall, “ The Soviet Union divides its economy into productive and nonproductive sectors. Productive sectors are those which produce material goods (industry, construction, and agriculture) and those which are needed to deliver material goods to their final user (freight transportation, business communications, and wholesale and retail trade). and Licari in applying I-O repricing algorithms, developed originally for East European I-O tables, to determine the interest rate.“ The repricing procedure or algorithm relies on a basic property of an I-O table: that the sum of the entries in a particular column must equal the sum of the entries in the corresponding row. That is, a sector’s sales must equal its total expenses, including profits. This proper- ty, plus the distribution of each sector’s sales de- scribed by an I-O table, provides the ability to relate an increase in the price of the output of one sector to increases in the costs of all sectors. Thus, equalizing the rate of return on each sector’s fixed and working capital implies a given set of changes in relative prices, and the I-O table can be used to compute directly the required array of price changes. A Comparison of Established and Factor-Cost Prices Tables 10 and 11 compare the percentage distribution of GNP by end use and by sector of origin, in established prices and in factor-cost prices. As expect- ed, the largest difference in the end-use distribution (table 10) is the increase in the share attributed to services, especially housing, when factor-cost prices are used. Expenditures on consumer services, which were 11.6 percent of GNP in established prices, are 19.5 percent of GNP in factor-cost prices. The hous- ing share increases from 0.9 to 7.0 percent of GNP. The shares of most other services also rise. The major reductions in GNP shares are in consumer goods, especially beverages, soft goods, and durables. These changes stem mainly from the elimination of turnover taxes. As a whole, however, the share of consumption is about the same in established prices (55.1 percent) as in factor-cost prices (54.2 percent). The share of investment is virtually unchanged by the use of factor-cost prices. Total investment is 28.5 percent of GNP in established prices and 28.2 percent in factor-cost prices, with the structure almost the same. ' “’ Alan A. Brown, Owen P. Hall, and Joseph A. Licari, Price Adjustment Models for Socialist Economies: Theory and Empiri- cal Technique, International Development Research Center. Bloo- mington, Ind., 1973. 40 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.