SOVIET ECONOMIST SAYS PRODUCTION FIGURES PADDED A leading Soviet economist said the practice of padding figures was significantly inflating the country's industrial production data. "According to the information of state monitoring organs, the padding of figures makes up one-and-a-half to three per cent of the volume of production," Alexei Sergeyev told the official newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya. "In my opinion, it is significantly higher," Sergeyev, who works at the Economics Institute of the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences, said. Most Western economists have for years allowed for a certain padding of figures when analysing Soviet statistics for industrial production. Sergeyev said about 600 mln roubles was lost annually in raw material industries by paying wages and bonuses for work which was not in fact performed. He said the elimination of figure-padding and other malpractices would save billions of roubles and would pay for the Soviet Union's social development program up to the year 2000.