Documents / FOIA release

USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and Development, 1950-80

Central Intelligence Agency · 1982-12-08 · 399 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 26 …the shifting of industrial produc- tion toward Siberia, which leads to longer shipping distances to reach…
  • p. 51 …may cost much more to construct in Siberia than in the Ukraine because of greater transportation…
  • p. 268 …European Russia, Ukraine, the “Volga Valley,” Western Siberia and Altay kray, and Northern and Central Kazakhstan…
  • p. 306 …Kok- chetav and Northern Kazakhstan are equated with Omsk in Western Siberia; all other Kazakhstan ob…
Approved for Release:
Several problems preclude widespread use of double
deflation:
- It requires a great deal of data to implement. A full
I-O table is needed for a complete accounting of a
sector’s inputs. A surrogate method relying on a
price index of a sample of a sector’s inputs can be
used, but even this requires much data and will not
support timely estimates.
' Double deflation assumes that the inputs actually
used in year t by sector j would have been used even
with a different set of relative prices, an unlikely
occurrence. It is possible that value added calculat-
ed by the double deflation method could be negative
if the prices of some of the major inputs in year t in-
creased greatly between year 0 and year t.
- Because double deflation is the difference between
two values, it is subject to large fluctuations that
result from small fluctuations in the two other
values.”
” Hill investigated the conditions under which double deflation is
the best procedure for estimating value added (Measurement, ch.
2.) Let y be the ratio in constant prices of the inputs used by sector j
in year t compared to year 0:
y = 3P(ii0)q(iJ.l)/ZP(i»0)q(iJ.0)-
Let z be the gross output index of sector j:
I = P(i,0)Q(i.I)/P(.i.0)Q(i.0)-
Finally, let x equal the ratio of sector j’s inputs to its gross output:
x = >3P(i,0) y (gross output grows faster than inputs) and if
w—l > 0 (the base-year share of inputs is between 0 and 1), then:
v = z+(w—l)(z—y)
= :z+b, where b > 0, and v > z > y.
The reverse is also true: if z < y, then v < z < y. Therefore, if in-
dexes of gross output and current inputs are both available, the
gross output index is always a better indicator of value added unless
the errors associated with the gross output index are much larger
than those associated with the input index.
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.