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 transport are measured by the number of rides; and taxi services are measured by the volume of paid kilometers. It was assumed that 25 percent of the 1970 expenditures on passenger transportation repre- sented business travel expenditures; this amount was deducted in arbitrary proportions from the rail, air, and taxi weights. No allowance was made for a change in the relative importance of business travel over time. Communications. Since a large share (about two-thirds) of communications activity is considered to be consump- tion rather than production related, we use our index for total communications as a sector of origin. This index is a weighted average of: (1) the volume of letters, newspapers, parcels, and money orders mailed, (2) the number of telegrams sent, (3) the stock of telephones and the volume of long distance telephone calls, and (4) the stock of radio and television receivers and the number of radio relay facilities. Repair and Personal Care. This index is the sum of expen- ditures on state-supplied services and on private serv- ices. State services include the repair of clothing, shoes, furniture, radio and television receivers; dry cleaning; film processing; and similar household serv- ices. The index is based on sales data in constant prices patched together from several Narkhoz series. Estimates of sales to state organizations were deduct- ed from the Narkhoz values. Also the value of materials used in some types of services, but not included in the Narkhoz data, were added. The purchase of private services is based on a few reports of aggregate expenditures and is not a satisfactory index. It represents, however, a declining share of the total index; hence, errors in the estimate of private services should not greatly disturb the total index. Recreation. The recreation index attempts to measure a diverse collection of expenditures. It is computed as a weighted average of the number of movie and theater admissions, the number of people attending resorts, and employment in hotels. The latter is a crude measure of personal expenditures on hotels. Education. The education index is a weighted average of indexes of employment and other current expendi- tures. The employment index is based on man-hour 47 data and is straightforward. The calculation of other current expenditures is quite complicated. It is based on budgetary data for several levels of educational activities. For each level, all labor and capital expend- itures identified in republic budget data are subtract- ed from the total, yielding a residual that is assumed to represent current expenditures other than labor costs. Each index of nonlabor current expenditures is then applied to a USSR total for that level of educational activity to obtain a series of nonlabor current expenditures expressed in current prices. The sum of those series is then deflated by our implicit price index for the consumption of goods.” Health. Construction of this index parallels that of the education index, but in less detail. Investment. The index of Soviet investment is a weighted average of indexes of new fixed investment and capital repair. The index of new fixed investment, in turn, is a weighted average of investment in machinery and equipment, construction and other capital outlays, and net additions to livestock. The index of investment in machinery and equipment is taken directly from the Narkhoz, and is said to be in constant prices. Most machinery and equipment, how- ever, are produced by the machinery sector, for which the published price index is widely believed to be seriously understated.” Thus, we suspect that the growth of investment in machinery and equipment may be overstated. The index of construction and other capital outlays are derived from our sector-of- origin construction index described below. The two major products of the construction sector are new construction and capital repair. The construction component of capital repair is estimated and then subtracted from the sector-of-origin index for the total construction sector. The Narkhoz series on " See M. Elizabeth Denton, “Soviet Consumer Policy: Trends and Prospects," JEC, I979, p. 766, for the derivation of this price index. ” An Analysis Qf the Behavior af Soviet Machinery Prices. I 960- 73, US Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., I979; and Abraham Becker, “The Price Level of Soviet Machinery in the 1960s," Soviet Studies 26, July 1974, pp. 363-379, are two of many sources that discuss the shortcomings of the official machinery price index. Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
Not linked to a story yet.
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.