National Income Statistics

Statistics, National Income 

the branch of economic statistics that studies the production, distribution, and use of national income. In the USSR the national income of the entire country and of each Union republic is computed each year by sector of the national economy and by form of ownership. The national income is computed by the following methods: production (as the sum of the net output of the various sectors of material production), distribution (as the sum of the primary incomes of persons employed in sectors of material production and the primary incomes of socialist production enterprises), and final use (as the sum of nonproductive consumption and accumulation).

The net output of the sectors of material production is determined for each sector as the difference between gross output and material production expenditures (outlays for raw and processed materials, fuel, and electrical energy, as well as depreciation on fixed capital stock).

The primary income of persons employed in sectors of material production includes the wages of production and office workers, the income of kolkhoz members received for work at the kolkhoz, and the income derived from personal subsidiary plots. The primary income of production enterprises includes profits, turnover taxes, deductions for social insurance, and other elements of net income. Income received on the basis of redistribution, called secondary income, is excluded from the national income.,Such secondary income includes pensions, grants, and the wages of workers employed in education or health or at other institutions and organizations in the nonproduction sphere.

Nonproductive consumption includes personal consumption of material goods by the population and material expenditures at institutions serving the population, at scientific institutions, and at general management institutions. Personal consumption by the population, which accounts for nine-tenths of the volume of nonproductive consumption, consists of the consumption of food products and nonfood goods purchased in state or cooperative retail stores and at kolkhoz markets, the consumption of produce received for work at kolkhozes or from personal subsidiary plots, and the part of the value of dwellings that corresponds to annual depreciation. Accumulation includes the annual increments in production and nonproduction fixed assets (buildings and structures, machinery and equipment, working and productive livestock), increments in material circulating capital (stocks of raw and processed materials, fuel, and finished output, as well as products left over from the retail trade and uncompleted construction), and increments in state material reserves and in stocks of agricultural products from personal subsidiary plots.

National income is computed either in the actual prices of each year or, in order to study changes over time, in comparable (constant) prices.

REFERENCE

Ekonomicheskaia statistika. Moscow, 1970. Pages 213–34.

M. R. EIDELMAN