Growth in the Inter-War Period: Some More Arithmetic.

This article paper is concerned with the similarity of the growth performance of the British economy during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties and with the usefulness of the "new-old" industry dichotomy in illuminating the trends of the inter-war period. The inter-war years emerge as a period of growth almost as rapid as any of comparable length in British measured history. The exact rating of the performance naturally varies slightly with the growth criterion adopted and the termini used for the other periods; the simplest way to establish the validity of the conclusion and at the same time leave it open to the reader's judgment is to draw in the inter-war trends on the Matthews graph. The similarity of the growth performance in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties is largely maintained even when activity is divided into Goods production and Service production. Services get their unity partly from their physical intangibility as final products, partly from supposed differences in income demand elasticities or productivity improvement possibilities, partly, and increasingly, from the statistical difficulties of arriving at satisfactory real output series.