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Soviet Machinery Output

A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Donald R. Hodgman
Donald R. Hodgman*
Affiliation:
University of California at Berkeley
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Extract

The speed of Soviet industrial expansion during the Five Year Plans as measured by the rate of growth of industrial output has evoked keen interest and much controversy among Western observers of Soviet affairs. Soviet industrial development has attracted attention from abroad for three main reasons: i) because of the accompanying rise of the Soviet Union as a great international power, 2) as an example of a centrally controlled and directed economy in action, and 3) as a possible model for the economic development of backward areas. The source of controversy has been the uncertain accuracy of the statistical descriptions of Soviet economic development and especially industrial growth.

Official Soviet measures of industrial output are suspect for reasons connected with the technique of their construction. Until 1950, published statistics on aggregate Soviet industrial output were expressed in prices nominally of the crop year 1926-27.

Type
Review Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , February 1953 , pp. 57 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1953

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References

1 A. I., Rotštejn, Froblemy promyšlennoj statistiki, SSSR (Problems of Industrial Statistics in the USSR) (State Social-Economic Press, Leningrad Division, 1936), I, 238–52.Google Scholar

2 Rotštejn, , op. cit., I, 247.Google Scholar

3 An exception is an index published in 1940 by the Deutsches Institut fur Konjunkturforschung in its Weekly Report, XIII, No. 11/12 (April 30, 1940), 41–46.Google Scholar Unfortunately, too few details concerning the composition of this index and the system of weights employed have been published to permit a critical appraisal of the results.

4 Colin, Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (2nd ed., London, Macmillan and Company Ltd., 1951), pp. 185–86Google Scholar. Naum, Jasny, “Intricacies of Russian National Income Indexes,” Journal of Political Economy, August, 1947.Google Scholar

5 Naum, Jasny, The Soviet Price System (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1951),p. 114.Google Scholar

6 Gerschenkron, , A Dollar Index of Soviet Machinery Output, 1927-28 to 1937, p. 5.Google Scholar

7 Soviet economists also have been interested in comparing absolute levels of Soviet and American production. In general, their approach appears to have been the short-cut method of using selective price ratios to convert ruble sums to dollars or vice versa. See the interesting discussion of one such attempt, S. Yugenburg's comparison of Soviet and American machinery production, in Gerschenkron, op. cit., pp. 59-67.

8 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., p. 33.Google Scholar

9 For dollar data see Gerschenkron, , op. cit., pp. 70–71 Google Scholar; for ruble data see Tsunkhu, , Sotsialističeskoe stroitel'stvo SSSR (Socialist Construction in the USSR) (Moscow, 1936), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

10 Op. cit., p. 28.

11 The dollar value of Soviet machinery products used in making the Soviet- American output comparison in 1934 was 707 million dollars or 32.5 per cent of 2,173 million dollars.

12 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., p. 38.Google Scholar

13 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., p. 48.Google Scholar

14 Ibid.

15 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., pp. 21–22.Google Scholar

16 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., Table 4, p. 26.Google Scholar

17 Professor Gerschenkron has only one over-all ratio of value added to gross value (53 per cent) which he applies to the dollar totals of Soviet farm machinery output for every year regardless of changes in product composition within the group. Thus, for farm machinery value added as calculated should be 53 per cent of gross value for every year. Instead the ratio of value added to gross value for the farm machinery industry drops from 53 per cent in 1927-28 to 32 per cent in 1932 to a final low of 27 per cent in 1937. (Cf. value added and gross value totals for farm machinery, Gerschenkron, op. cit., Appendix I, pp. 71 and 75, and the ratio of value added to gross value for the farm machinery industry in the United States in 1939, p. 83.) There may have been some special adjustment to farm machinery value added totals which would account for the decline in ratio of value added to gross value, but I have been unable to locate any explanation to this effect anywhere in the book.

The apparent computational error in the farm machinery value added totals is carried through into the value added totals for all machinery and makes its appearance in the text in the form of the value added index for all machinery and the annual ratio of value added to gross value (op. cit., p. 26). The farm machinery industry was an important branch of the Soviet machinery industry, so that understatement of its value added total by 30 per cent to 50 per cent in all years but 1927-28 results in a considerable understatement of total value added in these years and in the index of value added relative to the gross value index of Soviet machinery output (i.e., the value added index should register 488 in 1937 rather than 445).

18 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., p. 44.Google Scholar

19 Gerschenkron, , op. cit., p. 49 (italics in original).Google Scholar