Available information on FIDs must be used advisedly in investigating this hypothesis because it only began to appear in official FSU reports in the late 1980s, when foreign trade data were reported at both internal and foreign trade prices. Moreover, there is no Western analog to FTDs, which arise as ce'ntral planners try to fit world prices to those they establish in their plans. In discussions of fiscal policy they have come to be regarded as net indirect taxes; for monetary policy they are often noted as multiple currency practices. The distinction between monetary and fiscal instruments has no meaning for central planners but it does matter in deciding how to value national accounting aggregates in domestic currencies and which conversion procedures are consistent with which hypotheses about FTJ)s.

Table 2 reports an IECSE collation on FTDs. It summarizes foreign trade data of FSU for 1990 by individual partner country and several thousand commodity groups (to the 5-digit level of the CMEA trade classification system); with valuation both according to the foreign and intemal price (as differentiated in the notes to the table). It shows the tumaround on the export side, from tax to subsidy, when minerals are excluded. For nonfuel trade, the picture that emerges is what one would expect with an over-valued currency: the effective rate for imports implies a heavy tax while the effective export rate implies a hefty subsidy, relative to the official rate.

However, FsDs don't explain the gap between the official and back-casted commercial ate for the FSU, as they should given the presumed mechanism for fixing the commercial rate, as discussed above. While it is not yet possible to fully reconcile all data, enough is known to show that the conversion factor appropriate for Bank purposes lies below the official but above the commercial (once it existed) exchange rates.

Analysis of FTDs is complicated in the case of the FSU by the predominance of petroleum on the export side-- and the de facto inclusion of what most economies would record separately as direct taxes or royalties paid to government by oil companies. As a rough compensation, an export-side adjustment of the official rate by F1Vs could be envisaged exclusive of oil; which would imply an overvaluation of only 21 percent, which would produce a GNP per capita figure of about $5100 for 1990. However, that too seems colored by the asyet unexplained taxation of machinery exports, apart from those to high income OECD countries; depending on which further disaggregations of exports one considers, discounts 30, 60, or even higher percentages might seem reasonable. The picture is somewhat clearer when the import side is taken into account. There, the overvaluation appears to average around 60 percent (again ignoring fuels), which suggests a GNP per capita of $3840.

Even this is not unambiguous, however. For example, some discount should be applied to the import-side FTD adjustment for items otherwise subjec **t** o domestic turnover taxes. Once an FMD is applied, there is no separate levying of tumover tax. In this case, the FMD adjustment is around 40 percent, that results a GNP per capita of $4350.

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