Charting the British economy

To its Key Books and papers, designed for teachers and students in sixth forms and technical colleges, and its more advanced works intended generally for teachers and students of economics, the Institute is adding a work that is in some respects unique. Teachers often find difficulty in assembling in convenient form statistical source material relevant to their classwork or lectures. Students. lecturers, economists in business, general writers on industry and others find that the swelling stream of statistical material from government is difficult to locate, digest, and assess. The Institute therefore conceived a book that would assemble statistical material on some 70 or more main economic indicators or sectors of the economy and present them in the graphic form of charts that would also indicate significant relationships. The conception was thus of a book comprising not text illustrated by occasional charts but charts accompanied by text explaining their sources, significance and limitations.

It commissioned Mrs Barbara Marlow, a statistical consultant well-known for her work some years ago in the city pages of the Guardian and in other journals, as well as in several IEA publica tions, to compile the charts and write drafts of the text. She has earned the thanks not only of the Institute, but also of our readers, for her labours. The texts were revised by Mr Graham Hutton and Mr George Polanyi, who also wrote the prologue on the 'Use and Abuse of Economic Statistics, Since the book is intended for beginners in economics, it is

particularly necessary to emphasise the limitations of statistics so that they are not mis-used to support conclusions they do not justify. There are, as Mr Polanyi shows, not only technical difficulties in compiling them and problems in interpreting them; where official statistics are published by governments that are themselves deeply emmeshed in economic life, they must be read with especial care to ensure that they reflect accurately the conditions they are supposed to describe. The Institute has published several specialist works analysing the difficulty of measuring economic phenomena and the care that must be taken in reading their statistical measurement. In his Eaton Paper, Rich and Poor Countries, Professor Dan Usher has shown the limitations of statistics of national income and the difficulty of comparing them in countries at different stages of development; Dr Malcolm Fisher has also shown in his Eaton Paper, Macro-Economic Models, the nature and limitations of econometric methods. The Institute hopes to publish more special ised works indicating the significance and defects of official measure ments of prices, production, earnings, imports and exports, and other well-established indices.