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.
“V.M.”23 pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Soviet GNP Indexes End-Use Indexes Consumption. The consumption index (described in detail in J EC, Consumption) consists of three consum- er goods indexes and eight consumer services indexes. The consumer goods indexes are (1) food, (2) soft goods, and (3) durables. The consumer services index- es are (1) housing, (2) utilities, (3) transportation, (4) communications, (5) repair and personal care, (6) recreation, (7) education, and (8) health. Consumer Goods. Food. The food index aggregates 18 categories of food. Three basic types of indexes are used. Ten of the 18 (fish, meat, milk, vegetable oil, sugar, eggs, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, and flour and groats) are determined from physical per capita con- sumption data (published in the Narkhoz) and the size of the population. The milk, sugar, and flour and groats figures are known to contain the milk, sugar, and flour used in making butter, confectionery prod- ucts, and macaroni products, so deductions are made in order to avoid double counting. Six of the 18 indexes are based on production data (butter, cheese, tea, margarine, confectionery products, and bever- ages), with adjustments for inventory changes and foreign trade where possible. The other two indexes (macaroni and tobacco) are based on deflated retail sales data. Deflated sales data are less satisfactory than the per capita consumption and production in- dexes because Soviet price indexes probably under- state inflation and hence overstate growth. The 18 indexes are each multiplied by a 1970 estimate of consumption expenditures and then summed for each year to obtain consumption of food in 1970 estab- lished prices. For computation of the factor-cost prices, the food index was subdivided into four parts-—animal products, processed foods, basic foods, and beverages, so as to take account of the differential effects of subsidies and taxes on different types of foods. Conversion to factor-cost prices raises the weight of animal products and lowers the weight of beverages. Soft Goods. The soft goods index is a weighted sum of indexes for 15 line items. Nine line-item indexes (cotton, wool, silk, and linen fabrics; haberdashery; school supplies; publications; household soap; and toilet soap) are based on deflated retail sales. Five line-item indexes (hosiery; leather, rubber, and felt footwear; and knitwear) are based on physical produc- tion data, and one (sewn goods) is based on Soviet reported production in rubles in constant prices. As with the food index, each line-item index is multiplied by estimated consumption expenditures in 1970 and summed. No attempt is made to recompute the internal weights of the soft goods index in factor-cost prices. Durables. The consumer durables index is the least satisfactory of the consumption indexes. It consists simply of total deflated retail sales of nonfood goods less the deflated retail sales of identified nondurable goods. All retail sales are deflated, if possible, by the corresponding official retail sales price index. The resulting series undoubtedly includes some nondura- bles and is not adequately deflated. There is not enough information, however, to construct an index based on production or sales of individual consumer durables. Consumer Services. Housing. The housing index is the stock of housing measured in millions of square meters of urban and rural housing—the only aggre- gate data available. Since the index is based on purely physical measures, it does not capture changes in the average quality of Soviet housing.” Utilities. The utilities index is a weighted average of household consumption of electricity, gas, and the urban housing stock. The latter is intended to repre- sent household consumption of centralized heat, hot water, water, and sewage services, for which data are not available. Information for electricity and gas consumption is incomplete and involves some interpo- lations and extrapolations. Transportation. This index is a weighted average of nine modes of passenger transportation. Rail, sea, inland- waterway, bus, and air transport are measured by passenger-kilometers; tram, trolleybus, and subway ” See JEC, Consumption, for a more detailed discussion of this problem. 46 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.