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 materials permits a smaller value of materials to be used per unit of construction, then the ratio of material inputs to gross output would decline. On the other hand, if the use of improved materials permits the substitution of materials for labor and capital, then the ratio of material inputs to gross output would rise. The Soviet Union has published values for the gross output and net material product (NMP) of the construction sector for 1964-78 in current prices. The ratio of material inputs (gross output less NMP) to gross output declined slowly in this period (from 57 percent in 1964 to 54 percent in 1978), suggesting that the material-input approach is reasonably valid. This conclusion depends on the relative price stability between gross output and material inputs. The avail- able evidence does not suggest a divergence in the prices of construction output and its inputs. In addi- tion, US data show a stable ratio of material inputs to gross output in constant prices, ranging between 52 percent and 55 percent, since 1950. International comparisons are hazardous, but this stability also lends support to the use of a material-input index. Weights The weights used to combine the purchase indexes are derived from the 1972 Soviet input-output table. The construction column in that table enumerates the ruble value of purchases from each of 75 input-output sectors. The 1972 input-output table is available with 88 sectors. In order to make comparisons with the 1959 and 1966 input-output tables, however, tables in comparable 75-sector formats were used. The con- struction sector did not purchase any materials from l l of these sectors in 1972. Production indexes are not available for an additional 10 sectors. The purchases by the construction sector from the remaining 54 sectors were summed and converted into percentage weights (table B-1). The construction sector purchased over half of its inputs from just two sectors—construc- tion materials and transportation and communica- tions. A desirable development would be to disaggre- gate the construction materials sector. The data needed to compute the purchase indexes for the separate construction materials sectors for other years, however, are not available. Description of the Index The construction index is a weighted average of 54 purchase indexes, each showing the purchases by construction from the input-output sectors listed in table B-1. Each purchase index is computed in a two- step procedure. First, the shares of the gross output of each of the 54 sectors sold to construction were computed from the 1959, 1966, and 1972 Soviet input-output tables. It is assumed that the rate of change in these shares between 1959 and 1966 and between 1966 and 1972 was linear. It is assumed also that there was no change in the shares before 1959 or after 1972. The resulting time series shows the share of each sector’s gross output sold to construction. Second, the shares so derived were multiplied by the production index for that sector to arrive at an index of purchases by construction from each sector. Each purchase index was rebased so that 1972 = 100. A sample computation of a purchase index is shown in table B-2. To form the construction index, the 54 purchase indexes are multiplied by their corresponding weights from table B-1, and the products are added. The resulting index is shown in column 2 of table B-3. All but four of the 54 production indexes are for industrial sectors and were obtained from the index of industrial production described by Ray Converse in J EC, Industry. The indexes for the crops and animal husbandry sectors were derived from the data con- tained in the index of agricultural output as described by Margaret Hughes and Barbara Severin in JEC, Agriculture. The index for the transportation and communications sector is the index for freight trans- portation derived below in this appendix. The index for the trade sector is the index for wholesale trade derived below in this appendix. Although the material-input method is theoretically less desirable than either the gross output or double deflation method, it appears to produce reasonable results and to be the best available method given the data constraints. The material-input index can be 84 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.