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 income is excluded. Thus, Soviet net material product. omits about one-fourth of the resources used to produce goods and services in the USSR. In addition, ‘there is an upward bias in oflicial measures of activity. The result is that Soviet statistics on net material product provide an incomplete and distorted view of the size and growth of the Soviet economy. The need for independent measures of economic performance is heightened by the sparseness of oflicial data and their inconsistencies. The oflicial data tend to be published in insuflicient detail. the price base of some series are periodically changed, and the -product coverage may be altered without notice. For example, because the oflicial measure of consumption referred to as “real incomes of the population,” is not described adequately, its validity or usefulness cannot be fully assessed. The official series shows a higher growth rate than does the synthetically construdted index of consumption, in part because of the failure of the official series to take inflation into account. The Soviet indices of industrial and agricultural production are based on gross output rather than value added. As a consequence, double counting of materials used in production is incorporated in the indices, There is con»- siderable evidence that the oflicial index for industrial production has serious short-comings due to the treatment of price and quality changes. There is much evidence that prices assigned to new industrial products are too high relative to prices for older products in view of the changes in technology and quality taking place. In the consumer sector, there is considerable evidence that new, high-priced but only slightly altered products are deliberately sutbstituted for equivalent, low-priced products to syphon-off consumer purchasing power. The oflicial data treat such changes as if there were no real price increases, thus incorporating hidden inflation. THE GENERAL APPRoAcn The value of GNP can be calculated in two ways. One way is to derive GNP as the sum of the various end uses of the goods and services—consumption, investment, and government (both military and civilian). GNP can also be computed as the sum of value added in the several production sectors—indust-ry, agriculture, and the like. The intent of these studies is to replicate as far as possible, on both the sector of origin and end use sides of the accounts, the methodologies developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the OECD for the construction of Western economic accounts. Precise conformity is not possible, primarily be- cause the organization of the Soviet economy and the limited amount of data published by the Soviet Union require modifications and simplifications of the VVestern accounting framework. Defense expenditures are the most conspicuous example. Total defense is not identified separately in the Soviet GNP accounts contained in this volume because other GNP components, primarily investment and research and development expenditures, are thought to include substantial amounts of defense expenditures. As a separate exercise, the CIA estimates total defense expenditures directly from a detailed description of their defense programs and activities. The defense estimates have been explained and dis- cussed in the Joint Economic Committce’s annual hearings on the “Allocation of Resources in the Soviet Union and China.” Despite the limitations, it is believed that the measures developed—both the configuration of trends and absolute size~are reasonably accurate representa- tions of Soviet economic performance, can be compared with confidence with similar measures for Western economies, and are far more acceptable indicators ofstgonomic performance than the corresponding measures published by the U R. Gross national product is defined as the market value of the final goods and services produced by a given country. As applied to the Soviet economy, this 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.