>>7517<"The Soviet Institute of the Economy estimates that as much as 3 percent of industrial production and from 5 to 25 percent of raw material output is falsified."I don't know about those figures, but they probably did have inaccurate accounting.
Capitalist companies cook their books too, so capitalism isn't looking any better.
>>7518GDP figures are a distortion of reality if you use it to gauge production, but probably less so in the Soviet Case.
In capitalism GDP increases
- if somebody buys and sells stock certificates
- if a factory burns down and the capitalist collects fire-insurance money.
- GDP increases with rising rents.
In all those cases no production is taking place. The Soviets didn't have stock markets, and not much rent or insurance. So Soviet GDP figures probably deviate much less from production than capitalist GDP figures.
To be fair GDP was never intended to compare different economies, you were only supposed to use it for tracking the development of a specific economy over time. Also it wasn't always as shit. If you invent a metric, eventually people will figure out how to game the system, and then you have to deprecate the metric. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) has largely been abandoned in favor of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), which is a much better metric. At least for the time being, eventually PPP numbers will be gamed as well.
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