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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. 36 …In the USSR the collective farm, or kolkhoz, is part state and part cooperative. The land…
  • p. 47 …0.66e_ Consumer cooperatives 1.283 i Retained profits of consumer cooperatives 0.821 Tax on…
  • p. 50 …Hill, The Measurement of Real Product, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, 1971; R…
  • p. 103 …Net profits of consumer cooperatives were included with retail trade and public dining. Subsidies. This item…
  • p. 118 …and economic admin- istration, administrative organs of cooperative and social organizations,” for which employment and oth…
  • p. 119 …Social organi- zations include the administrative organs of the All- Union Society of Consumer Cooperatives, the…
  • p. 130 …The profits distributed to consumer cooperative members are now considered to be a transfer receipt rather…
  • p. 133 …Profits distributed to consumer cooperative members 0.027 9. Total income 217.206 Sources to this…
  • p. 134 …Profits distributed to consumer cooperative members. See CIA, GNP I970, p. 23. 9. Total income. This…
  • p. 135 …State, cooperative, and commission sales 141.096 (1)Fo0d 84.104 (2) Soft goods 42.734…
  • p. 137 …Charges paid by members of housing 0.075 cooperatives for maintenance lmputed gross rent on urban…
  • p. 138 …Taxes on land and buildings owned by individuals and cooperatives are from Gosb_vudzhet I972, p…
  • p. 139 …Retained profits of consumer cooperatives 0.821 d. Retained profits of other organizations 0.321 2…
  • p. 142 …Profits distributed to consumer 0.027 cooperative members 8.’C;solidate_d total outlays 215.841…
  • p. 147 …Consumer cooperatives 1.283 (1) Retained profits of consumer cooperatives 0.821 (2) Tax on income…
  • p. 160 …532) plus a share of the amortization deductions of consumer cooperatives. Altough consumer cooperatives are primarily…
  • p. 162 …532) and amortization deductions of consumer cooperatives on industrial capital (0.083 billion ru~ bles-—see…
  • p. 164 …retained profits and income taxes of consumer cooperatives and other organizations, respectively. 7. Total pra/its…
  • p. 257 …Other state purchasing orga- nizations are the Central Union of Consumer Cooper- atives, and the Ministries…
  • p. 286 …Review of I978 and Outlook for I97 9, Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service, April 1979, p…
  • p. 330 …exceeded the prices paid in state and cooperative retail outlets by an average of ~59 percent…
  • p. 331 …index of retail prices in state and cooperative outlets. The index which shows almost no change…
  • p. 332 …In coverage, it differs from the CIA index of consumption, mainly by inclusion of cooperative housing…
  • p. 335 …purchases of these items in state and cooperative retail outlets and in collective farm markets, including…
  • p. 339 …The index implicitly covers all goods purchased in state and cooperative retail out- lets, except those…
Approved for Release:
The average air revenue rate in 1970 was obtained by
adding an arbitrary profit markup of 25 percent to the
estimated 1970 average cost of 12.5 kopecks per tkm.
An average cost of 17.7 kopecks per tkm in 1965 is
given in N. N. Barkov, ed., Zheleznedorozhniy trans-
port v sisteme edinoy transportnoy seti USSR, Mos-
cow, Transport, 1967, p. 51. The average cost for
1965 was extrapolated forward to 1970 using the
average rate of decrease of 7 percent per year calcu-
lated from data for 1958-68 published in Flight
International, 25 September 1969, p. 485.
Description of the Index
The physical data for freight transportation are shown
in table B-9.The resulting values for gross revenue of
freight, passenger, and total transportation are shown
in table B-10 in ruble and index format. The sources
for the freight transportation data are as follows:
Mode Physical Measure Sources
Ilail, inland water, Ton-kilometers
sea, air, and oil
pipeline
Transport i svyaz ', p. 17,
and similar tables in
Narkhozy for subse-
quent years.
Ibid, p. 222, and similar
tables in Narkhozy for
subsequent years.
Ibid, p. 204, and similar
tables in Narkhozy for
subsequent years.
Truck Ton-kilometers
Gas pipeline Cubic meters
Ideally, the physical series for gas pipelines should
take account of the increasing average distance that
gas is transported as a result of the exploitation of
Siberian fields. Unfortunately, we do not have suffi-
cient data to estimate changes in the average distance
transported. Hence, no adjustment is made to the gas
pipeline index.
Communications
The index used for the communications sector is
identical to that used for the communications compo-
nent of the consumption index. The methodology and
data used are described by Schroeder and Denton in
JEC, Consumption.
93
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Trade
Scope and Coverage
The trade sector in Soviet statistics encompasses a
range of activity roughly equivalent to the wholesale
and retail trade sectors in the US classification.
Included are: retail trade, public dining, foreign trade,
film rentals, material-technical supply (concerned
with supplying production enterprises and farms),
wholesale trade (concerned with supplying consumer
goods to retail trade outlets), and agricultural pro-
curement (concerned with state purchasing of farm
products from producers). For a more detailed de-
scription, see Ukazaniya, pp. 748-751.
The index of value added in the trade sector is based
on the assumption that value added is correlated with
the volume of goods processed by the trade sector.
The trade sector is divided into three major branches
(retail trade, wholesale trade which includes material-
technical supply, and agricultural procurement), and
an index is computed of the value in 1970 prices of
goods processed by each branch. The trade index is a
weighted average of the three branch indexes. The
weights are the value added of each branch in 1970.
The coverage of the trade index is nearly complete.
There is no explicit measurement of the activity
associated with foreign trade, but much of this activi-
ty is probably captured in the retail and wholesale
trade indexes. Film rentals are not included, but the
value added associated with them is tiny. The retail
trade index implicitly includes the activities of public
dining enterprises.
An alternative procedure, used in the US accounts, is
to deflate the current-price value of sales in the
various trade channels. It is not employed here be-
cause of the lack of reliable price deflators.
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.