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Estimating the Soviet Wage Bill from the Receipts of the Social Insurance System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Jack Minkoff
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Extract

In recent years information has appeared in various Soviet publications which has enabled students of the Soviet economy to compute the average wage of Soviet workers and employees with a considerable degree of confidence. Generally the data provided have been in the form of percentage increases in the average wage above a base year for which the average wage is known or has been reliably estimated. Much of this information has been summarized in an article by Holzman, and he presents there an index of the rise in the average Soviet wage since 1928. This development very likely also contributes to increased accuracy in estimates of the wage bill, as figures are readily available on the size of the nonagricultural labor force for these years. But gaps still exist in our knowledge. Statistics of the type used by Holzman and others in calculating the average wage have not been published for some of the years prior to 1950.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1961 , pp. 679 - 684
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1961

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References

1 Holzman, Franklyn D., “Soviet Inflationary Pressures, 1928-1957: Causes and Cures,“ Quarterly Journal of Economics, May, 1960, Table 1, pp. 168-69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 CCCP (Moscow, 1955), pp. 130-31; (Moscow, 1955), pp. 193-94.

3 Hoeffding, O. and Nimitz, N., Soviet National Income and Product, 1949-1955, RAND RM-2101 (Santa Monica, 1958), p. 64.Google Scholar

4 No. 7-8, 1937, p. 51.

5 (Moscow, 1948), pp. 153-56.

6 See No. 9, 1958, p. 30. Robert Myers also obtained information from Soviet officials regarding the rates applicable to several unions and passed this information on to me.

7 Soviet works, published in different years, have stated either that tax payments constitute 98 per cent or more than 97 per cent of total social insurance income. op. cit., p. 127. For a few years figures are available on both tax payments and total revenue, and in almost all these years taxes did represent 98 per cent of total income. op. cit., p. 30, and (Moscow, 1957), p. 66. Although statistics on tax payments were on hand for these few years, we still computed the wage bill by deducting 2 per cent from total income, since the two sources cited gave somewhat conflicting sums for the size of the tax payments. For 1958 the 2 per cent deduction was not taken, as we were aware only of the amount of taxes paid by state institutions.

8 Bergson, Abram and Heymann, Hans Jr., Soviet National Income and Product, 1940-48 (New York, 1954), p. 127.Google Scholar

9 Yanowitch, Murray, “Changes in the Soviet Money Wage Level Since 1940,” American Slavic and East European Review, XIV (April, 1955), pp. 219 and 223; Yanowitch here also cites the estimates of Schwartz and Wiles.Google Scholar Herman, Leon M., “The Seven-Year Haul,“ Problems of Communism, VIII, No. 2 (March-April, 1959), p. 14.Google Scholar