Search

The article presents the argument that greater equality in the distribution of costs and rewards of development is demanded by the value system of the Filipino and by the development process itself. Important steps toward equality would be agrarian reform, educational reform, and tax reform. For these to be carried out there is need for organized pressure from below. There is need also for strong and efficient government, whether it will in the long run be democratic depends on the attention given to genuine education and human development at the broad base of society. The aspirations of the great majority of the people for a higher standard of material welfare are evident and reflected in many surveys. Per capita income figures demonstrate that the Philippines is a poor nation and that a reasonable level of material welfare cannot be provided by redistribution alone Economic development and accelerated economic development are absolutely necessary if the Philippines is to meet the rising demands of its constantly increasing population.

The article comments on the papers of Barry Bosworth and Robert J. Gordon about wage and price control in the U.S. I thought Bosworth's paper was excellent. I am grateful for the presentation and assembling of data that had not previously been properly correlated--for example, the reconciliation of Pay Board wage approvals with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on union wage settlements. Undoubtedly, a significant disinflation began with the freeze. Although individual estimates of the precise impact may vary, something significant happened at that point. Nonetheless, the data lead me to conclude that the impact of both the Price Commission and the Pay Board on actual prices and wages has been surprisingly small. First, the overall price situation indicates that, with the exception of a few building materials, few prices would be raised if the controls were removed. For example, recent evidence on the term limit pricing agreements indicates that, whereas the average approved price increase was about 2 percent, only a small proportion of these increases have been put into effect. Thus, it appears that because of weak market conditions, these firms were unable to raise their prices even with Price Commission approval. The wage side is a little more difficult to evaluate. The institution of a general wage standard would be expected to narrow the distribution of wage increases by reducing the larger increases.

This article presents a list of new publications related to social forces. These publications are: "Relation of the State to Industrial Action and Economics and Jurisprudence," edited by Henry Carter Adams and Joseph Dorfman; "The Farmer Looks at His Economic Security: A Study of Provisions Made For Old Age by Farm Families in Wharton County, Texas," by William G. Adkins and Joe R. Motheral; "Our Wildlife Legacy," by Durward L. Allen; "Your Stake in Social Security," by Arthur J. Altmeyer; "Property, Profits and People," by Thurman Andrew; "Appraisal of Census Programs"; "The Negro and the Schools," by Harry S. Ashmore; "Colonial Development and Population in Taiwan," by George W. Barclay; "A Philosophical Study of the Human Mind," by Joseph Barrell; "The Juvenile in Delinquent Society," by Milton L. Barron; "Democracy in the Home," by Christine Beasley; "Power and Influence," by Lord Beveridge; and "Population and Income on Montana," by W. Gordon Browder and Harold J. Hoflich.

Professor Littleton's paper seems especially timely in view of the present day ideas accounting as a record of original prices and widely fluctuating prices as a normal pattern-there seems to have come the conviction that accounting for outlay cost can no longer be considered a dependable guide to those who look to accounts for essential information. And the conclusion then follows that account keeping or financial statement practice must be modified to suit the new background. The assumption that problems of income distribution dividends, income tax, speculative security profits are of more importance than problems of the measurement of the income generated by the creation of new wealth or the rendering of acceptable services. The assumption that accounting has a more important obligation to supply data useful in managerial pricing policy than it has in facilitating the comparison of past input of services costs with past output of services revenues. The assumption that accounts and statements are merely tabulations of statistical data related to social income and as such are open to any desired manipulations by statistical methodology, such as weighting by index numbers, reduction to averages, elimination of seasonal variations, etc.

Comments on several articles about the economic development of the United States. Factors that changed income distribution in the country; Arguments on the growth of demand from capital-intensive subsectors.

This article discusses the effect on income of Phase II of the wage-price control program of the United States. Several discussants commented on the issue of income shares under the Phase II program. R. A. Gordon, William Branson, and others noted that, with productivity growing exceptionally fast because of the rapid cyclical expansion expected in the economy, profit margins would widen so much that some cost absorption by business would still permit the profit share to expand. Arthur Okun noted that Perry's neutrality was defined as the state of income shares that would prevail in the absence of the program and that the cyclical expansion of profit margins that we are experiencing would have occurred anyhow. Gardner Ackley argued that we did not know enough about what has happened to price-cost relations in recent years to take any strong position about what income shares should be. Therefore Perry's neutrality concept should not override the need to slow inflation, and some cost absorption was appropriate as a way to help accomplish this. James Duesenberry and Michael Posner felt that the most serious practical problem was not the question of existing income shares but rather delivering on the promise to slow prices noticeably. The trade unions are reluctant to accept wage controls because they have little faith that the inflation will slow down. Differing views were expressed on the use of profit margin ceilings in Phase II. Alan Greenspan pointed out that the application of the rules on the basis of the margins of individual firms would hold down overall prices and margins more than people thought.

This paper has evaluated the empirical usefulness of six different monetary aggregates for the period 1953-I through 1971-I and the two sub periods 1953-I through 1960-IV and 1961-I through 1971-I. When alternative adjustments are made for the disturbance created by the major industrial strikes of this period, it is found that changes in the narrow money stock have a greater capacity to explain movements in two different measures of income than either changes in bank credit or four broader definitions of money. Moreover, results from estimates of two alternative reduced form systems, in which changes in income are determined by changes in two monetary variables and man-days idled by strikes, also confirm that the narrow money stock was the most empirically useful monetary aggregate from 1953-I through 1971-I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on various papers on income distribution. It discusses various aspects of capital output and wage sharing as written in the research paper of economist Sidney Weintraub. The paper is said to have uncovered a constant through both the short and the long run. This has been accomplished by calculating the labor share of the gross business product rather than of national income or of private national income. However, this means that Weintraub has added to the normal recipients of national income-labor and capital-government as a recipient of indirect business taxes and capital consumption. These two new non-labor recipients grew relatively in the depression of the thirties, thus balancing the disappearance of profits and cutting down labor's normal rise in a deep recession. The article also discusses on the research paper given by economists Oswald Brownlee and Alfred Conrad. Their paper evaluates the distributive effects of inflation as compared to those of several policies alternative to inflation including a tight money policy, a policy of increased federal taxes, and a policy of decreased federal expenditures.

The article presents discussions by economists on papers by economists James N. Morgan and James D. Smith that was published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that the two papers presented by Morgan and Smith reflect changing times. According to the author, income distribution and especially the distribution at the low end are back in the spotlight as an issue of social policy and appropriately it is eliciting scientific attention. Early in the 1960's, concern with sharing the national economic pie was eclipsed by the urgent concern about the lagging growth of the pie. Economists were wise to focus on the aggregative issues in the early 1960's and it is wise to shift focus onto distributive issues as one enters the 1970's. Now that the U.S. has reaped important benefits of economic growth and high employment, other problems deserve emphasis. Both of the present papers make a contribution to that knowledge. They reflect different methodological approaches and stress different issues. They do share one substantive characteristic, pointing to the importance of labor force participation by the wife as a key determinant of family income and income changes.

The article presents a reply to the comments of Irwin Garfinkel and Stanley H. Masters in "Two Income Maintenance Plans, Work Incentives and the Closure of the Poverty Gap," a response to the author's paper concerning the benefits of wage subsidies for closing the poverty gap and providing work incentives. It is argued that while Garfinkel and Masters level some legitimate criticisms, the central conclusion remains unchanged. A justification is provided for measuring nonemployment income by using transfer payment income.

The article discusses earning distribution and the valuation of shares based on other studies and gathered evidence. Some research shows that distributed earnings have a greater impact on equity prices than retained earnings. Also, the price-earnings ratio of the shares of a firm with a given investment policy are invariant to alternative earnings-payout ratios. Share prices are affected by the U.S. dividend policy due to the tax subsidy on capital gains and substantial brokerage fees. 255 firms, grouped into 8 different industries, are examined in this paper.

The article presents some abstracts of published materials concerning income and employment theory. The first paper entitled "Balanced Growth: A Razor's Edge?," by C.A. Akeklof and W.D. Nobbhaus discusses Cobb-Douglas production function. Another abstract entitled "Neoclassical Theory of Technical Progress and Relative Factor Shares," by C.E. FERGUSON contains a summary restatement and interpretation of the neoclassical theory of distribution, relative shares and technical progress. The paper entitled "Inflation, Income Distribution and Capital Accumulation in a Two-Sector Model of Growth," by D.J. Harris brings together some of the structural and behavioral features of the process of capital accumulation. Structural features considered relate to the technical specificity of capital equipment in production of consumer goods and capital goods. The abstract entitled "Toward the Application of Dynamic Growth Theory to Regions," by L.M. Hartman and D. Seckler develops a regional investment model to formulate more precisely the question of whether a region is capable of sustained endogenous growth.

The article presents critical discussion of two papers by George Garvy and Edward F. Denison on the distribution of national income. According to the author Garvy has expressed some doubt as to the existence of a long-term trend of diminishing income inequality. Both manners have also stressed the very crucial choice of income definitions and the basic family unit used in measuring inequality statistically. Garvy has also suggested an interesting change in the income unit used to measure inequality. The usual per capita income measure may be useful from a welfare standpoint or in relation to consumer demand. Commenting on the paper by Denison, the author says that he has identified the ordinary business sector and then, within that division, distinguished several farm and non-farm ownership forms and property income sources. At the end of his paper, Denison introduced the government as tax collector and payer of transfer incomes. The author applaud his remarks on the effect of taxes and transfers and regret that the scope of his paper could not have been somehow extended to include more discussion of income redistribution.

This article discusses the paper presented by Edward C. Budd and David F. Seiders which focuses on the impact of inflation on size distribution of real income and net worth of individuals and groups in the economy. According to the author the study made by Budd and Seiders takes a partial and exogenous view of inflation. The author presented that the notion of inflation can be examined in the absence of other influences. The author emphasized that there is a need for more insight into the process by which inflation is generated and the consequences in light of the process.

The article explains various aspects of Negro life and their economic conditions and poverty. The relatively large number of Negroes in poverty has been explained in a variety of ways, for example, differential levels of education, market discrimination, or other factors associated with race. In this brief paper, an attempt will be made to evaluate the relative contribution to Negro poverty of two factors, namely educational differences between Negroes and whites and a composite of all other elements correlated with race. The article presents a conceptual framework of the process of income distribution, which will be of assistance in identifying the impacts of both race and disparate education levels. Second, some empirical evidence will be presented which sheds light on the relationships suggested by the conceptual framework. Finally, the significance of the empirical evidence for the policy issues implicit in the problem of the relative incidence of poverty among Negroes will be discussed.

Presents a paper that focuses on the Phase II and Phase III programs and the effect of wage-price increases on the economy. Need for wage-price controls to end; Failure of wage-price controls; Comparison of the different Phases employed over the years to combat recessions; Shortages in various industries as a result of wage-price controls; Speculation on how wage-prices should be controlled in the future.

The article performs a statistical appraisal of the impact of the wage-price controls in the U.S. The condition of the U.S. economy improved in almost every respect after the initiation of the wage-price control program on August 15, I971. Real gross national product grew rapidly, unemployment finally began to decline, and the rate of inflation moderated. But the coincidence of timing does not necessarily mean that controls are an essential condition for prosperity, or that the August 1971 message was the key that unlocked the floodgates behind which real aggregate demand had been restrained. The determination of the four basic macroeconomic magnitudes--nominal (current dollar) income, real output, prices, and unemployment--is usefully separated into three subproblems: (1) the determination of nominal income, (2) the division of that nominal income between real output and prices, and (3) the relationship between real output and unemployment. Before the achievement of the control program can be evaluated, a criterion for its success should be established. By my standard, controls can be judged successful if the value to society of the reduction in inflation they achieve relative to that which would have occurred without them is greater than the direct and indirect costs imposed by the control program.

The sociological conference in Moscow, Russia chose for discussion three subjects which seemed to have intrinsic importance and also to be relevant to the wider question of international understanding and peaceful cooperation, as of May 1, 1960. The first was the variety of attitudes and public policies relating to educational selection and income distribution in different modern societies. The second concerned the divergent conceptions of sociology itself, as influenced by national traditions, social doctrines, and forms of social structure, and manifested in the content and organization of teaching and research. The third subject was a proposal for international comparative research on the content of films, which had in view not only the value of factual investigations of an important medium for the transmission of social values, but also the interest of trying out in practice new forms of international scientific co-operation. A number of working papers were prepared in advance as a basis for the discussions.

This section presents abstracts of papers published in the June 1965 issue of the journal "Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Volkswirtschaft und Statistik." The paper "Circular-Flow Effects of Foreign Trade on Growth and Income Distribution" analyzes the impact of foreign trade on economic growth in terms of a macro model with export and import functions depending on income and prices. The model is used primarily to investigate the reaction of prices, income distribution and undistributed profits to changes in investment and export ratios. The paper "Price and Income Elasticities of Swiss International Trade" paper presents estimates of price and income elasticities for Swiss imports and exports derived by ordinary least squares from annual data for the period 1949-1959. The estimating functions are assumed to be linear in the logarithms. "Methods of Macroeconomic Planning in Developing Economies" is a survey of macroeconomic planning models mainly, but not exclusively, based on studies for various countries in South-East Asia. Up to the present time, development planning is mostly based on partial projections. these relatively simple and largely intuitive techniques are in the process of being gradually supplanted by integrated macro models.

This article presents a commentary on the issue of optimum lifetime distribution of consumption expenditures. This paper has sought to show that there are serious errors in Lester C. Thurow's paper which nullify his empirical results. His assertion that zero-savers are likely to be behaving optimally has been shown to be false. His "scaling up" technique has been shown to depend on a critical and probably false assumption. Finally the authors have developed a simple model which can be used to predict optimal consumption and in which the patterns of the zero-saving income level and of optimal consumption are necessarily different. Preliminary results suggest that the divergence between actual and optimal consumption, at least in the aggregate, is not particularly large.

The article presents discussions by economists on some papers that are published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that economist Robert J. Lampman's paper first presents an accounting framework for analyzing the processes of extra market redistribution in the U.S. and then goes on to discuss some current income maintenance reform proposals. The author discusses each of those quite distinct parts of the paper in turn. According to the author, the accounting framework Lampman outlines represents an attempt to classify and measure the processes of redistribution of incomes in much the same way the national income accounts treat processes of production and the market generation of incomes. In any pioneering effort of this sort, difficult conceptual issues arise which require hard decisions and inevitably invite some disagreement as well. Among several such issues that could be raised with Lampman's approach, the author has selected two that especially interest him for discussion.

The article presents a critical discussion of the paper by Clark Kerr, Martin Bronfenbrenner and Harold M. Levinson about the effect of collective bargaining on national income. According to the author all the three papers shows that the data on national income show surprisingly little influence on the part of collective bargaining, in so far as the distributive shares are concerned. Levinson finds a tendency for labor's share to rise slightly in the industry groups which are rather well unionized, while no such rise in labor's share seems to have occurred, on the average, in certain parts of the economy wherein unionism is weak. Bronfenbrenner gives hesitant support to Levinson's conclusion that the shifts toward labor's share maybe attributed to the strength of unionism. Kerr can find no significant relationship between degree of unionization and labor's share, when industry-by-industry comparisons are made. The consistency of the employee compensation share of national income is noteworthy, considering the several influences which might be expected to alter it over the years.

The article presents a list of books and articles on economic relations. Some of the books and articles on world trade are "Industrial Growth and World Trade," by Alfred Maizels; "The Ohlin-Heckscher Theory of the Basis of Commodity Trade," by J.L. Ford, published in the September 1963 issue of "Economic Journal"; "World Trade Outlook," published in the October 1963 issue of "International Commerce." Some of the articles on regional economic groups include "America Gets an Unexpected Break," by Henry S. Reuss, published in the Fall 1963 issue of "The Atlantic Community Quarterly"; "A Canada-U.S. Free Trade Arrangement," by Sperry Lea; "U.S. Should Move Toward Common Market With U.K.," by I. Harold Kellar, published in the November 1963 issue of "Export Trade"; "International Manual on the European Economic Community," by Henry Junckerstorff. Some of the books and articles on economic development and aid are "The Wedding Income Gap," by Gunnar Myrdal, published in the September 1963 issue of "International Development Review"; "Economic Development: Past and Present," by Richard T. Gill.

The article presents information on research papers prepared by researchers at the University of Warwick in Warwickshire, England. The study on the concept of fairness in industrial relations was conducted by Richard Hyman in order to investigate the values and beliefs of the participants in industrial relations as they relate to the question of "fairness," focusing primarily on conceptions of fairness in wages. This involves the influence of "just wage" versus market ideology, beliefs concerning "fair comparisons" and conceptions of "a fair day's work" and their relation to the effort bargain, and beliefs relating to income distribution between wages and profits. Subsidiary areas of inquiry concern conceptions of fairness in relation to discipline and managerial authority in general. The findings from this study will be related to a number of issues of major theoretical interest including social influences on beliefs; the choice of comparative and normative reference groups; and the manner in which the orientations and beliefs of social actors affect the goals they pursues their perceptions of situations, and the nature of their behavior.

This paper has developed a simple analytical framework to integrate those factors which have frequently been used to explain income differentials. The key to this exercise was found to be the explicit consideration of the operation of individual endowment constraints. The resultant earnings function was then estimated as part of a system of simultaneous equations. Because the data employed for this purpose are necessarily specialized, the generality of the results is limited to college-trained and other such high-status individuals. The sample does, however, demonstrate some commendable characteristics. With an average of nearly twelve years of labor market experience, career patterns in our sample are fairly well established; the results, consequently, should be superior to those of Ashenfelter, Mooney, and Gross. The ability measure, in that it considers learned habits of work as well as intellectual aptitude, appears more satisfactory than that used by Ashenfelter and Mooney. Labor market experience is separated into its comprehensive and job-particular components with some interesting results. Substantial detail is available in variables representing education, employment-type, work-activity type, and region of residence. Most important, we believe that this is the first econometric study to allow earnings and nonpecuniary job satisfaction to be simultaneously determined. While our finding that satisfaction is a positive determinant of income is provocative, perhaps the most appropriate conclusion to be drawn is that more work is necessary in order to understand fully this relationship and that such work should return to the mainstream of economic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a discussion of two papers that analyzed wage-price controls in relation to inflation. Criticism of the papers.

This section presents abstracts of studies on economics which were published in the April-June 1964 issue of The Indian Economic Journal. The paper titled Some Further Notes on Aggregate Capital-Output Ratio, by V. V. Bhatt, presents the behaviour of aggregate capital-output ratio and discusses in light of empirical evidence, its usefulness as an analytic tool for the purposes of planning and projection. The paper titled Income Distribution, Investment and Growth, by Robert Eisner, looks at the notion that an increased share of profits must lead to greater investment or capital accumulation is shown to be subject to serious doubt. The paper titled Prices and Production in Agriculture, by G. P. Kapur, discusses the effects of prices on production of foodgrains and agricultural commodities in general.

In this article the author comments on the research paper "A General Theory of the System of Multilateral Trade," by K.E. Hansson. The author says that Hansson's paper is helpful in relating conceptually the structure of production-conceived in terms of the relative abundance or scarcity of different factors of production, in different groups of economies, to the anticipated and actual pattern of trade between these groups of economies over different periods in their development. Hansson begins his general theory with the broad statement that international trade takes place in response to the unequal distribution of the factors of production. It should be noted that there is nothing in this model which warrants the inference that the clearance will be complete like the trade surplus and deficit of each country with its respective trading partners will balance out. The author says that an important element left out of Hansson's general theory is the income aspect of trade determination. The possible dampening effects on trade from a more equal distribution of factors may be more than offset by the higher income levels which accompany the attainment of the new pattern of factor distribution.

The article discusses the assumptions made in the paper "Income Distribution, Value Judgments, and Welfare," that appeared in a previous issue of the "Quarterly Journal of Economics." The paper assumed that distribution value judgments are independent of the level of total income. However, no such assumption can be maintained in the multi-commodity case as it either conflicts with the underlying postulate that welfare is a function of individual utilities or else implies that all indifference maps are homothetic (indifference curves are radial blow-ups of each other). An examination of the ordinary box-diagram convinces one that the only case in which this effect cannot arise is where all indifference maps are homothetic, a condition much too restrictive to be assumed. The assumption of distribution value judgments as independent of the level of total income must be removed in the multi-commodity case. Its removal can be easily accomplished without altering either the major theorems of the paper or its general argument. They are in fact strengthened by the removal of what was perhaps the most restrictive assumption made.

After giving a brief discussion of the biases that exist in the conventional estimation procedures followed in the construction of national accounts, this paper argues for restructuring of national accounts so as to treat human capital formation as investment rather than consumption and suggests that a beginning should be made in respect of schooling. The argument is based on the notion that "investment" or "capital" is that which yields future income streams and also on the rather obvious point that treating as consumption large outlays that really constitute investment distorts analyses of resource allocation, growth and income distribution, and obscures intersectoral relations. It is pointed out that the proposed restructuring of national accounts is more relevant and important for developing countries, many of which are embarked on investment planning. Another major point emphasized is that the input of students' time should be properly measured and included in the estimates of capital formation by schooling. To illustrate what these proposals imply, revision has been attempted of the estimates of (a) educational outlay (or activity in the education sector), (b) gross capital formation, and (c) gross national product, pertaining to the national accounts of a major developing country, namely India, for the years 1960-61 through 1965-66. The modified estimates, though first approximations and covering only a part of the human capital formation and having a systematically downward bias, nevertheless indicate an upward revision of the estimate of activity in the education sector by about 200 to 300 percent, of gross capital formation by about 50 percent and of the gross national product by 4 to 7 percent. These magnitudes show the substantial order of distortion involved in the conventional procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the by-products of the literature which followed the publication of Phillips's (1958) well-known paper was the development and elaboration of models of individual behavior in labor-market disequilibrium (see Phelps [1969] for a survey). In retrospect this may be the most significant consequence of the Phillips curve analysis, since the labor-market models may suggest ways for tackling the wider problem of the adjustment to equilibrium which is still in a very messy state, in this paper we shall consider one aspect of the problem which has been neglected by the "new microeconomics," namely, the implications of attitudes toward risk for individual behavior in disequilibrium. Section II introduces the concept of a risk premium which is then used in Section III to analyze the relationship between individual behavior toward risk, job search, and the structure of wage offers by firms. Sections IV and V consider the relationship between the distribution of risk attitudes and the distribution of income and wealth among individuals. A concluding section points out some of the implications of the analysis for empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has discussed possible mechanisms for achieving ex ante and ex post equality of political income. While any of the structural reforms could be implemented separately, it makes the most sense to combine, them. Indeed, the "equal-stake" criterion is to some extent a necessary condition for the implementation of a redistributive vote tax. A voter's winning percentage on an issue set cannot be regarded as an index of his political income unless each vote has an equal value ex ante to all voters. The idea of the state arising from a "social contract" formed by all citizens to achieve collective ends can imply the concepts of both ex ante and ex post political income equality. Of the two, only ex ante equality has received attention in the literature. Yet, to those who embrace the equalitarian ethic, the ex post equality of political income should be of even greater importance than ex ante equality of voting rights. This paper argues that the attainment of ex post equality of the political income distribution is conceptually plausible and quantitatively important. Further, a policy of vote taxation does not appear to be subject to as serious disincentive effects as taxation to obtain complete equality of ex post private economic income. This follows by analogy to elasticity conditions where voting takes very little time as opposed to the length of the work week, for example, and attempts to equalize realized private income. There do not appear to be any functional equivalents under present democratic systems to achieve ex post equality of political income. Indeed, taking the United States as an example of a two-party, geographic-based democratic system, one could argue that there are perverse mechanisms, such as monopolistic systems of committee power and the like, which tend to lead to greater inequality of realized utility for many voters. Many voters from lower income-education classes do not vote under the present system, which, although it does not... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to define some of the critical problems relating to agents' compensation—from the standpoints of the insurance companies, policyholders, regulatory bodies and the agents themselves. The provisions, purpose and implications of Section 213 of the New York expense limitation law are reviewed. The impact of various new agents' financing plans and patterns of agents' compensation (i.e., renewal commissions, vesting provisions, service fees) is explored. Particular attention is focused on the problem of inadequate service, orphaned policyholders and related agents' compensation. A study of New England Life agents' Income levels by years of service is set forth. Compensation problems in certain special markets (Minimum Deposit, Pension Trust, Tax-Sheltered Annuities, Split-Life, Mutual Funds, Salary Savings, Variable Life) are reviewed. The paper concludes with some thoughts regarding possible changes in the Ordinary agency distribution system of the future, particularly as it relates to the ‘expanded financial services’ concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the author's reply to comments made by several economic historians on his paper "Wealth of Jamaica." Information on errors of wealth and income measurement in the author's paper; Denial that plantations and plantation colonies in the West Indies were profitable enterprises by researcher Robert Paul Thomas; Discussion on the measurable aspects of the sugar colonies of the old empire; Table showing the value of Jamaica's exports of sugar products to Great Britain and Ireland.

This article criticizes the Phase II of the wage-price control program of the United States. A number of issues concerning the present program of price and wage controls divide members of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, as they divide economists generally. This paper does not deal with the more basic of these issues. Rather, it takes as given the decisions to freeze prices and wages last August 1971, and to follow the freeze with a program for Phase II having essentially the objectives of the present one. It considers how well the program is achieving these objectives and whether and how they might be achieved more effectively. The treatment is selective rather than comprehensive. Assuming that the administration knew what it was getting into in adopting mandatory wage and price controls, it surely deserves credit at least for courage in electing to use them. And having taken that decision, it did some things well. First, it gave no indication that it was going to take this course; the public, business, and the unions were taken completely by surprise. The result is in sharp contrast with the terrible mess created in 1950, when discussion of a possible freeze was allowed to go on for nearly six months -- and government officials themselves actively contributed to it.

The article presents comments on cross-national study of inequality. Although inequality on a national level is most often conceived in economic terms, it also has political and social dimensions, and its study can provide common ground for several social science disciplines. Despite this fact, sociologists have avoided doing research on inequality. Cross-national analysis of the determinants of inequality by sociologist Phillips Cutright may by regarded as one of the first empirical contributions by a sociologist to this area of study. Cutright's paper is an interesting and provocative piece of research, but it is open to criticism from several perspectives. One of these is the possibility of measurement error in the dependent variable; a second concerns the meaning of his index of inequality, derived from differences between the incomes of various sectors of the national economy; and a third concerns the validity of his measures for some of the independent variables in the study.

The article presents discussions on the economic effects of war worldwide. Professor John U. Nef presented papers on the effects of war on technology. According to him, the years of peace in the late fifteenth century were especially rich in technological achievements in Italy, the Low Countries and above all in the Rhineland, Germany, and Central Europe. This was a barren period for technological improvement in England, where the bitterly fought Wars of the Roses lasted from 1455 to 1485. The late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries were a time of bitter and almost continuous warfare on the continent, a time of virtually complete domestic peace in Great Britain. Professor Wesley C. Mitchell discussed the effects of the Civil War on prices, wages, and the distribution of income. According to him, the American dollar lost two-thirds of its value in gold within two and a half years under the greenback standard and then climbed unsteadily back to gold parity over a period of fourteen and a half years. The Civil War gave Americans for seventeen years a dollar exceedingly unstable in relation to gold.

This article introduces a series of papers on income redistribution and the labor supply in the U.S. Income redistribution is an important element in the elimination of poverty. Related schemes such as the negative income tax, guaranteed annual income, children's or family allowances, demogrants and many others are being evaluated in efforts to identify strategies that would cover all low-income households, specifically including the percentage of the poverty population not receiving public assistance. Such a radical extension of redistributive impact raises important questions about the effect of affected households on the labor supply. This concern is reinforced by a growing recognition that existing programs for maintaining incomes are very poorly structured for encouraging the efforts of beneficiaries to support themselves. The cost of redistribution in terms of total output via the labor supply response is an important element to consider in choosing an acceptable goal for income distribution. Before deciding how much to weaken the relation between productive effort and disposable income for the active members of the labor force, it seems imperative to know how a given change will affect their work decisions.

The article presents response of the author to the comments made to his article "Note on "Measures of Urbanization," With a Further Proposal,"by sociologist Jack P. Gibbs. According to the author, at points Gibbs interprets him literally to the last letter, as when he emends his statement that the Gini coefficient measures "the extent to which the urban population is concentrated in large cities" to read "in larger cities." Moreover, according to the author Gibbs nowhere defines the degree of technical dependence among his measures. In his original paper and in his reply to the commentary, Gibbs stresses the logical possibility of divergence among the three measures. Gibbs dismisses his contention that the X and Y , respectively, the proportion of the urban population in units above a certain size and the proportion of the total population in the same units, are mathematically dependent. He repeats the example given in the original paper, which shows only that the proportions in the two distributions can vary.

The article discusses the abstracts of several papers on economics published in the April-June 1965 issue of the "Indian Economic Journal." Some of the articles presented in the journal are: Keynesian Monetary Theory and the Developing Countries," by Anthony Bottomley; "An Empirical Estimate of the Elasticity of Substitution Production Function," by R.K. Diwan; "A Note on the Choice of Surplus-Maximising Technique," by J.C. Saigal; "Taxation and the Changes in Income Distribution," by Mahfooz Ahmad; and "On Throwing the Baby Away With the Bath-Water--An Essay in the Defense of Keynesism in Relation to the Underdeveloped Countries," by Ashok Mathur. The monetary theories of Maynard Keynes are remembered and admired in even the most backward countries. But they must be treated with considerable reservation by students of poverty and under-employment throughout the Third World. In the third article, J.C. Saigal attempts to derive the long-term surplus-maximising technique by the use of Sraffa-Neumann process analysis.

Presents a series of abstracts on various topics of economics published in the July 1964 issue of the journal 'The Southern Economic Journal.' Emergence of income differences in various regions in the U.S.; Criteria for the measurement of a potential welfare improvement.

The article presents discussions by economists on some papers that are published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that economist Harry Magdoff's paper, published in the present issue of the journal, reminds its readers that neoclassical economics deals with market relations and not with power relations. The study of imperialism, in contrast, is mainly concerned with the level of coordination above that of the market where state power is used to manipulate the economic framework within which supply and demand interplay. The analytical focus is the way one-country exercises power over another and how this affects trade, development and the distribution of income. According to the author, the first point to be stressed is that the neoclassical model, which includes market equations and excludes political equations is misspecified and yields biased estimates and wrong predictions. The comfortable assumption that one can concentrate on economic relations and leave the analysis of power to other disciplines is not tenable when one admits the crucial role of the state in shaping the economy through its policies on infrastructure, education, production and other things.

This article lists several papers on economics. Some of the papers are "Mr. Harrod's Dynamic Model," by S.S. Alexander, "The Substitution Effect in Value Theory," by R.G.D. Allen, "The Advent of Academic Economics in England," by S.G. Checkland, "Professor Goodwin's Matrix Multiplier," by J.S. Chipman, "A Proposal for Extending the Theory of the Firm," by W.W. Cooper, "Equilibrium Among Spatially Separated Markets: Solution by Electric Analogue," by S. Enke, "The Theory of Effort and Welfare Economics," by A.E.C. Hare, "Economics and the Social Sciences," by A.G. Papandreou, "A Note on the Theory of Income Redistribution," by A.T. Peacock and D. Berry, "The Pricing of Manufactured Products," by E.A.G. Robinson, "The Problem of Integrability in Utility Theory, "by P.A. Samuelson, "The Factor and Goods Markets, " by R. Turvey and H. Brems.

Comments on research on poverty and social issues in the U.S. in 1965. Key issues of interest; Analysis of pertinent topics and relevant issues; Implications on the social sciences.