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: 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 2019/07/19 C05210421 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 under it. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.