Between last autumn and this spring, national output rose fast. Those who said, eight months ago, that the Government's November measures would by themselves rapidly produce a deflation have been proved wrong. In the first quarter of this year, the gross domestic product was some 4 per cent higher than in the same quarter of last year—when, in turn, it had been some 8 per cent higher than at the beginning of 1963.

During the last twelve months there was some slowing down in the growth of industrial production in the main industrial countries as compared with the previous twelve months, but this occurred for the most part during the second half of 1964, with France and Italy registering actual falls in production, and output in the United States being adversely affected by the motor car strike in October. The first half of 1965 has seen a sharp acceleration of the rate of expansion overall, but this has by no means been the universal experience. French production has ceased to fall but remains stagnant and output in Italy is showing only a modest rise. One of the main factors in the high rate of expansion this year has been the exceptional rise in the United States, partly due to abnormal stockbuilding of motor cars and steel. Growth in Germany has been somewhat slower during 1965 as it has also in this country, and production in Japan, which increased by over 30 per cent during the last two years, has been completely stagnant this year (table 12).

There is no perfect measure of a country's balance of payments and no ideal way to present it. Some valuable standardisation has been achieved by the International Monetary Fund, but Official presentations still vary quite widely between one country and another and between different periods for the same country.

Two methods are used in the preparation of the official import forecasts in Britain. There is the detailed commodity-by-commodity approach, designed to bring in any special factors or information about particular commodities. There is also the aggregate approach, which attempts to find relationships between the volume of imports and various national expenditure series. This note describes a series of experiments conducted to investigate and, if possible, improve the second of these two approaches. It does not attempt to provide a full theory of import behaviour. It is simply concerned to find a method of import forecasting that works reasonably satisfactorily over a short period of 1-2 years.

This note analyses the price changes of some 470 manufactured products in five recent years. They were taken as a sample from the price quotations on which the Board of Trade bases its wholesale price index for manufactured products. Since the conclusions for the engineering industry are rather different from those of other industries, the two groups— engineering and non-engineering—are discussed separately. Food, drink and tobacco prices are excluded throughout.

The present paper assembles some basic facts for assessing the social security system of this country. There is no absolute criterion for judging the adequacy of the provision for relieving poverty and insuring against interruption of earnings. But comparison with arrangements in certain other countries may suggest fruitful ideas for improvement. The British system of social security is at present radically different from, and the benefits provided on the whole considerably less generous than in most West European countries. In the following section we describe first the origin and main features of the British system as it has developed since the last war and then compare it with arrangements in the Common Market and certain other countries.