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: Appendix B Sector-of-Origin Indexes Industry The derivation of the production index for each branch of industry, except for the other industry branch, is described by Ray Converse in JEC, Indus- try. The 1970 established-price weights for the branches of industry are derived in appendix D, table D-7, and the factor-cost weights are derived in appen- dix E. The index for the other industry branch is assumed to be equal to the index for total industry and is computed as a weighted average of the other 10 branches. The indexes for total industry and for all branches of industry are reproduced in appendix A, table A-5. Construction Scope and Coverage The construction sector in Soviet statistics includes new construction and capital repair of buildings and structures, oil and gas well drilling, design work connected with the construction and capital repair of buildings and structures, and geological survey work (USSR Gosplan, Metodicheskiye ukazaniye k sas- tavleniyu gosudarstvennogo plana razvitiya nar0d— nogo khozyaystvo SSSR, Moscow, Ekonomika, 1969, pp. 746-748, hereafter referred to as Ukazaniya). All construction activity is included regardless of whether it is performed by contract organizations or on force account. In recent years, about 90 percent of con- struction-installation work has been performed by contract organizations. In contrast to Western ac- counting practice, new construction and capital repair in the USSR include the cost of installing machinery and equipment. The United States uses the double deflation method to compute a value-added index in constant prices. Gross output in current prices is deflated using price indexes for several types of construction. Then materi- al inputs in current prices are deflated by a price 83 2019/07/19 C05210421 index constructed as a weighted average of price indexes for the various materials used by the construc- tion sector. Subtracting the deflated material pur- chases from the deflated gross output produces value added in constant prices. Price changes are notoriously difficult to measure in construction because there are few standard products for which comparable prices exist. The Soviet Union probably collects more data on construction costs than most nations, but has not published a price index, much less one backed by sufficient data for independ- ent testing. The lack of standard products makes it impossible to construct a physical output index. Faced with the same lack of Soviet data, Powell constructed a material-input index, consisting of a price-weighted average of the production of 28 types of construction materials, to measure real changes in the gross output of construction (Raymond P. Powell, “An Index of Soviet Construction, 1927/28 to 1955,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 41, May 1959, pp. 170- 177). The same basic approach is used here. Input- output data for 1972 are used to derive weights for the purchase of 54 types of materials by the construction sector. Similar data for 1959 and 1966 are used to estimate changes in the share of the production of each material purchased by construction over time. The share for each year is combined with the corre- sponding production index to form an index of pur- chases of that type of material by construction. The construction output index is a weighted average of the 54 purchase indexes. This approach assumes that the ratio of material inputs to gross output is constant. The validity of this approach depends on the manner in which productivi- ty gains have been introduced. Productivity growth can influence the output of a sector through higher quality material inputs or through the better use of labor and capital resources. If the use of improved 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.