Documents / FOIA release

USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and Development, 1950-80

Central Intelligence Agency · 1982-12-08 · 399 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 19 …Monica, Calif, 1962; Becker, 1969; and Sally Anderson, Soviet National Income, I 964-I 966, in…
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF RUSH V. GREENSLADE
The research in this volume owes an immense debt to the work of the late
Rush V. Greenslade. Dr. Greenslade was employed at the Central Intelligence
Agency from the early 1950’s until his retirement in 1973. For many years he
directed CIA’s research on the Soviet economy. After his retirement, he con-
tinued as a consultant and advisor to the CIA until his death in 1978.
Dr. Greenslade’s primary contributions were in the area of quantifying and
analyzing Soviet economic development. He developed an index of Soviet in-
dustrial production in the 1950’s and wrote frequently on industrial trends. He
was also closely involved in shaping the analytical framework and in organizing
the collection of data for estimates of Soviet GNP. In the early 1970’s, he led
an effort to convert the GNP estimate to 1970 prices and to reexamine and im-
prove all of the methodologies and data supporting these estimates. This work
led to the publication by the CIA of a set of GNP accounts for 1970 and an
article in the Joint Economic Committee’s 1976 compendium on the Soviet
eeonomV- “The Real Gross National Product of the U.S.S.R., 1959-1975.”
This volume extends Dr. Greenslade’s work by updating and documenting
the 1970 base-year accounts and the many time series used in calculating each
sector-of-origin and end-use GNP index.
Dr. Greenslade was also deeply involved in the analysis of the size and
structure of the Soviet economy in relation to that of the United States and
other countries. An earlier volume in this series on Soviet GNP compared
Soviet consumption with consumption in the United States and other countries.
This project was designed and directed in its early stages by Dr. Greenslade.
Dr. Greenslade also played a leading role in forming estimates of the dollar
value of Soviet investment based on new ruble-dollar ratios for machinery and
construction. The results of this ru'ble-dollar ratio research were published by
the CIA. Dr. Greenslade’s research on international economic comparisons
culminated in a new comparison of Soviet and United States GNP since 1955
published by Edwards, Hughes, and Noren in the Joint Economic Committee’s
1979 compendium on the Soviet economy.
(IX)
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.