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.
“Anderson”1 page
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 investment in construction-installation work is be- lieved to overstate the growth of new construction. While the residual calculation used here is not fully satisfactory, the resulting index does show slightly slower growth than the Narkhoz series. The series on net additions to livestock is a part of the index of agricultural output and is based on reported changes in livestock numbers. The major difficulty with this index is that large changes in livestock inventories often reflect disproportionate swings in the numbers of young livestock, whose value per head is less than average. This causes excessive fluctuations in the index. The capital repair index is a deflated current- price index. The major data available on capital repair are current-price data on amortization deduc- tions and budget allocations for capital repair. The machinery and construction components are deflated separately using price indexes constructed by compar- ing Soviet production in current prices with our reconstructions in constant prices. Other Government Expenditures. Government Admin- istrative Services. This index is a collection of small services: (1) general agricultural programs, (2) forest- ry, (3) state administration and administrative organs of social organizations, (4) culture, (5) municipal services, and (6) civilian police. All of these indexes are based on man-hour employment because we have no physical indicators to measure the output of these services. As is well known, indexes based on employ- ment, by definition, do not reflect changes in labor productivity. Research and Development. This index attempts to measure what the Soviet Union defines as science expenditures. Unfortunately, Soviet data and defini- tions are not always clear and often conflict with other published data. The problem is greatly com- pounded by the belief that Soviet science is heavily oriented toward military objectives and by the fact that many different sources of finance exist. Thus, this index is subject to considerable error in its interpretation and growth rate. It is constructed as a weighted average of man-hour employment and other current expenditures. The employment component is based on Narkhoz employment data for science and estimated average annual hours of work. The other current expenditures component is based on data for 1960-72 from a Soviet monograph and the observa- tion that other current expenditures were a nearly constant share of total expenditures in that period. The resulting current-price expenditure data are de- flated by a price index made up mostly from Soviet wholesale price indexes and weighted by the structure of material expenditures in science. Outlays n.e.c. This final end-use component is the residual of total GNP, calculated from the sector-0f- origin indexes, less the identified end-use components described above. This component includes a large portion of defense expenditures, net exports, inventory change, other unidentified outlays, and a statistical discrepancy. Sector-of-Origin Indexes Industry. The index of industrial production is a weighted average of 10 industrial branch indexes: (1) ferrous metals; (2) nonferrous metals; (3) fuel; (4) electric power; (5) machinery; (6) chemicals; (7) wood, pulp, and paper; (8) construction materials; (9) light industry; and (10) food industry. Each branch index is the sum of several subbranch indexes combined by value-added weights derived from the 1972 I-O table in producers’ prices. Each subbranch index measures the gross output of an I-O sector by summing the physical production of several products, each multi- plied by a base-year price. We do not have an index for the llth branch, “other branches of industry." We assume the index for this branch to be the same as that of total industrial production. The index of industrial production is explained in detail by Ray Converse in JEC, Industry. Construction. It would be desirable to measure con- struction activity by its gross output, but the only data available are a current-price gross output series and a constant-price series for the construction-installation component of investment (Soviet definition). The lat- ter excludes a significant part of the output of the construction sector (capital repair) and probably is not adequately deflated. For these reasons, we have con- structed an independent index. It is a weighted aver- age of material inputs. The structure of inputs is taken from the 1972 Soviet I-O table, and the growth 48 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.