Applied economis: aspects of the world economy in war and peace

THE main excuses for publishing a book which, like this one, discusses a number of separate topics without attempting to weld them into a single whole must necessarily be that the topics are individually interesting, and that no adequate treatment of them from the point of view which is in question can be easily found elsewhere.
Whatever the faults of the chapters that follow, these claims can, at any rate, reasonably be made on their behalf. The first two of them treat of aspects of recent world economic history on which there is much published material not hitherto brought together and commented upon as a whole. These two chapters make no claim to do so in anything but a tentative and preliminary way. The statistical material is (or is rapidly becoming) available for a reasonably complete account of the structural changes in the main national economies of the world during the past decade or two, in terms of national income and outlay-for the main framework, in fact, of an economic history reasonably satisfactory to a modern economist. It is to be hoped that such a history will some day be written; meanwhile, what is offered here may provide the reader with a rough sketch of some of the ground, and may also, perhaps, provoke some further exploration of it.