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This article presents a discussion of E. M. Bernstein's paper about the financial problems of economic development. Bernstein discusses five facets of this problem: to decrease the size of the development program, to energize the inflow of foreign capital, to encourage domestic savings, to gather together the available resources, and to allocate the resources available to the private sector in a way that will stimulate the greatest increase in production. The author believes that this analysis leaves no room for argument.

Presents abstracts of studies about economic development and trade, presented at a convention in Rome, Italy in September 1965. 'A Factor Analysis of the Interrelationship Between Social and Political Variables and Per Capita GNP,' by Irma Adelman; 'An Almost Consistent Intertemporal Model for India's Fourth and Fifth Plans,' by Joel Bergsman.

The article presents a list of papers presented to the 1963 Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. The conference was held during June 23-28, 1963. There were five sessions, which covered topics like national incomes, growth rates, economic growth, etc. Some of the papers were "Rates of Growth in Israel's Economy," by A.L. Gaathon; "A Statistical Evaluation of the Rate of Growth of National Income in Postwar Japan," by M. Shinohara; "Reliability and Usefulness of Short-Term National Accounts: Australia," by Don Youngman; and "New Evidence on Demand Elasticities," by H.S. Houthakker.

This article presents information regarding the problems faced by the developing countries in their course of development. The problems faced by the developing countries of the world are numerous and of critical importance. These problems include those of industrialization and economic development, of changing traditional social institutions such as stratification and power mechanisms so that they facilitate rather than inhibit modernization, and of providing ever-increasing percentages of citizens with an education that teaches the economic and social skills requisite to assuming rewarding roles in a changing society. However, in the array of social and behavioral sciences that have been brought to bear upon the problems of developing countries, social psychology has been noticeably absent. Anthropologists have carried over their interest in traditional societies to include concern with the problems these societies face in the processes of modernization and development, particularly as these processes affect values and institutions such as the family and religion.

The article presents a discussion of the research paper by Simon Kuznets on the difficulty of making an orderly pattern of long-term change and how it lies in the absence of an effective theory or even of a working hypothesis. The paper deals with economic forecasting. The reviewer presents an analogy to gross national product forecasting. Examined is the rise of the gross national product in 1953 and what it is forecasted to be in 1965. Also commented on is the annual capital increase in real Gross National Product.

The article presents a discussion of papers written by Norris Johnson and John Scanlon. These authors discuss economic forecasting from 1957 to 1967. Particular attention is given to how the demand for capital funds are crowding the supply during most of this period but not in such a manner as to give rise to major capital shortages. The author states that there is no proof positive way of assessing the reliability of the assumptions made in this paper or their implications for the adequacy of funds.

Information about several papers discussed at the conference "Economic Development of European Socialist Countries," which was held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on November 30 to December 6, 1964 is presented. The various reports presented focused on the comprehension of the economic trends and problems in Eastern Europe. Such features and issues considered including balance of payments, labor skills, and technological innovations.

The article presents a list of books and papers about economics. The books and papers include "The Oxford Economic Atlas of the World"; "International Affairs," edited by Alfred De Grazia, "A Bibliography of Higher Education in Canada," by Robin S. Harris, "Latin America," published in "The International Advertiser," "Agriculture and Growth," published in "Latin American Business Highlights," "The Problems of Federalism," published in "Executive," and "How Will Nuclear Energy Grow," published in "Common Market."

The article focuses on some of the problems developing countries face as it pertains to central banking. This study will briefly survey the role, problems, and the latency of central banks in developing countries, with some discussion of the methodology and techniques of monetary policy that have been utilized. In order to keep the paper's content manageable, no attention will be given to foreign exchange and payment policies, although these are taken care of by the central bank and are a significant aspect of monetary theory.

This paper considers the properties of the Divisia, or chain-link, index, as they relate to the argument that this is the most appropriate index for use in studying the sources of economic growth. The great advantage of the Divisia index is alleged to be its ‘accuracy’, that is, its capacity to combine time series of prices and quantities to give a true reflection of the height of a utility or production function over time. The paper shows that there are circumstances where the confidence in the accuracy of the Divisia index is justified, but that the conditions required are very restrictive and typically do not obtain in the contexts where the Divisia index is used. Misplaced confidence in the Divisia index has led to errors of interpretation that might otherwise have been avoided, and has given rise to a distorted view of the process of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical changes, up and down, have taken place in the estimates of growth in total factor productivity in the U.S. made by different economists, or by the same economists at different times. If such estimates provide ‘some sort of measure of our ignorance,’ as Abramovitz once put it, we seemed to be a lot less ignorant in 1927 (when Cobb and Douglas published their famous paper), or in 1967 (when Jorgenson and Griliches published theirs), than we were in the years between (when Schmookler, Abramovitz, Kendrick, and Denison completed their studies), or than we are today (when we have, or will soon have, revised estimates by Denison and by Kendrick, and new estimates by Christensen and Jorgenson). Viewed in this perspective, many questions may be raised about the significance of the current estimates that something like a third or more of the rate of increase in U.S. national output is ‘due’ to increase in productivity, as well as about the concepts, data, and methods that underlie the estimates. A list of particular subjects worth considering for research is given and each is briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Warsaw Conference on the Marxian theory of Development centered on two related questions; (1) is there in Marxism a distinctively Marxian theory of development? (2) if there is, what guidance can it give today to countries at varying levels or stages of development? In his paper "The Marxian Theory of Development and Socialist Economic Policy," professor J.S. Berliner, held that the sociologist Karl Marx was primarily concerned with the process of capitalistic development. The Marxian doctrine, Berliner contended, applied primarily to fully developed capitalistic economies, their fundamental internal contradictions being supposed to lead inevitably to their bursting asunder and to their supersession by socialism. The title of the paper which professor W. Brus presented jointly with professor K. Laski was "Essentials of the Marxian Approach to Problems of Economic Development." For them the fundamental category of the Marxian theory of economic development was perhaps one which is both social and economic and is summed up in the expression mode of production. It would appear that Marxism does not furnish a set of formulae for development, from which practitioners can easily find out what to do in specific cases. Marxism does seem, however, to offer a box of tools, a set of canons, a method indicating how one might go about formulating what one wants to do by way of development.

The theory of optimum economic growth that has been developed in the past few years is concerned primarily with the division of the national product between consumption and investment in order to attain the pattern of capital accumulation which the society as a whole prefers to all the alternative schedules. It has been discussed within the conceptual framework originated with Frank Ramsey's classic work, where the basic premises are those of a planned economy within which decisions concerning the allocation of scarce resources are made by central planning authorities. The emphasis placed upon the role of centralized planning is partly due to the growing awareness, based upon both the prewar experiences of the more advanced countries and the postwar experiences of the less developed countries, of the inadequacy of the market mechanism to bring about the desired pattern of economic growth. In a static environment, the (Pareto-) optimality of the allocation achieved in a perfectly competitive market has long been established as one of the basic propositions in welfare economics, but the analysis has not been extended to the case of a greying economy, except for a number of studies originating with Samuelson and Lerner. The purpose of the present paper is to compare the relationships of the growth pattern achieved under the market mechanism with these of optimum growth, in terms of the analytical apparatus recently developed by Koopmans, Cass and others. The concept of optimum economic growth adopted here, however, differs from that commonly used in the optimum growth literature, where the welfare criterion by which various time-paths of consumption are compared with each other is assumed to be exogenously given, in general independently of the preference schedule of the members of the society. In the present paper, we shall instead postulate that the aggregative behavior of the economy may be described by that of the representative individual unit, possessing a... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The paper presents a model of interest rates structure with direct implications to the saving-investment process. The capital market is divided into private and government sectors, which operate under the constraints of an investment-opportunities function and a cost of capital function. The model provides the government with a degree of freedom to differentiate the lending rate from the borrowing rate. This allows the government to conduct a capital policy aimed at achieving a certain desired level of savings without disturbing the process of capital allocation. The technical operation of the model is based on an institutional structure existing in many developing countries. It allows thereby a direct application for empirical research. The paper is concluded by an empirical testing of the interest rate structure in Israel and of the consistency of the Israeli Government capital policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the estimation of an econometric model designed to test the Modigliani-Miller (henceforth MM) hypothesis. The primary interest is not in the theoretical validity of the hypothesis. The major sources of theoretical disagreement with Modigliani and Miller arise from the key role they impute to the arbitrage process and the effect of leverage on the expected value of the returns to equity through the increased probability of bankruptcy. These issues have occasioned a number of important contributions in recent years (see especially [2] and [23]). The first section of the paper provides a skeletal outline of the MM hypothesis and discusses the problems of formulating an appropriate econometric model. In the second section an econometric model is developed, which, while drawing on the ideas of several
1 This study is part of a continuing program of research into company financial behavior financed by a grant from the Social Science Research Council. I am indebted to Mrs. Eileen Sutcliffe of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of York, and Milton Chen of New York University for assistance with data collection and computer processing, and to the personnel of the SRC Atlas Computer, Chilton, the University of York Computer Center and the New York University School of Commerce Computer Center.
2 References in square brackets are listed on pp. 161-2, below.
3 In terms of the implicit aggregation procedures, the old Liquidity-Preference/ Loanable-Funds controversy has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
different writers, has certain elements of originality in the way it seeks to incorporate growth and leverage. Finally, in the third section the results of the econometric tests are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at the conference "Intra-Country Discontinuities in the Process of Economic and Social Development in Latin America" which was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina on September 8-16, 1964 is presented. The various reports dealt with topics including international cooperation, methodology of comparative social research and socio-economic development. The convention featured several social scientists including Davis Kingsley, Bruce Russet and S. Gostkowsky.

The article presents a list of books and papers about economic development and aid. The books and papers include "Development Planning," by Albert Waterston, C.J. Martin, August T. Schumacher and Fritz A. Steuber, "Unsolved Problems of International Development," published in "International Development," "Patterns of Economic Growth," "Developing Countries," published in "Realites," "What Do We Know About Planning," published in "International Development Review," and "Development Finance: Planning and Control," by Ursula K. Hicks.

The author comments on the article "Commercial Banking in the Sixties," by Paul S. Nadler. The article centers on the over-all growth of the commercial banking system in the 1960s as compared with growth in the gross national product (GNP). According to Nadler, that commercial banking deposits will not grow as fast as GNP, which results in the conclusion that other financial institutions will necessarily grow more rapidly than commercial banks. The author explains that he agrees with Nadler's findings.