Canada's Economic Prospects: A Survey of Ten Industries

In: Canadian journal of economics and political science: the journal of the Canadian Political Science Association = Revue canadienne d'économique et de science politique, Band 27, Heft 2, S. 261-267

Abstract

Historians will probably mark the 1950's as the period in which the economists' two-decade preoccupation with stability gave way to a revival of their long-run and continuing preoccupation with economic growth. If they do, they will be under obligation to explain the coincidence of economists' renewed interest in growth and the economic affluence attained by those societies which produced most of them. Why should economists of the Western world assign primacy to growth and at the same time voice concern that most of their fellow citizens already earn larger incomes than they can dispose of intelligently? An obvious explanation, but not necessarily a full explanation, is that in the mid-twentieth century economists have become very much aware of the political interdependency of nations. The growing economic strength of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the poverty and illiteracy of new African and Asian nations, not the low income of Mississippi dirt farmers, Belgian coal miners, and Sicilian fruit pickers, spark the interest of Western economists in economic growth. Growth rates otherwise sufficient to produce consumer affluence in Western countries may not in prevailing political circumstances assure this affluence and adequate defence, supremacy in space technology, and large aid programmes to underdeveloped countries.