Suchergebnisse

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several
Punjab Settlement Officers attempted to estimate food consumption rates.
These estimates, based on direct observation and ad hoc guesses, were
made partly out of academic curiosity, but more urgently, as an aid in
establishing the land revenue (i.e., tax) rates. The pre-1926 estimates
are summarized in Table I, expressed in pounds of wheat and other
foodgrain consumption per person per year1. Broadly speaking, the later,
more systemtic observers (e.g., Sir Ganga Ram and C. B. Barry), found
lower consumption levels than the earlier observers. It was generally
accepted that the rural populace ate better than urban dwellers. Despite
the ingenuity of the early Settlement Officers, their compiled estimates
suffer from all the difficulties of haphazard small sample observation.
Given the revenue purpose of the estimates, they may be biased towards
the able-bodied, economically active, population. Further, the very
early estimates may have confused dry weight with cooked weight,
including water.

Everyone who has heard of Harrod-Domar realises that growth
targets imply something about savings rates. But growth targets also
imply something about the availability of capital goods. The business of
economic planning, as Winston points out [1], is to ensure compatibility
between the Harrod-Domar and the Mahalanobis constraints. If domestic
savings exceed the availability of domestic plus foreign capital goods,
two "despised alternatives" confront the economy: inventory accumulation
or slower growth. To avoid this unhappy predicament, Winston outlines
three remedial policies. Our purpose is to suggest that the Harrod-Domar
and Mahalanobis constraints may not be independent. Remedial policies
aimed at that larger capital goods supply may affect the private and
public savings rates and the growth of income. These suggestions are
hardly novel [2]. They turn on re¬placing the proportional savings
function with a classical savings function (i.e., one which specifies
private savings rates by economic sector), on distinguishing tax rates
by type of domestic production and imports, and on stipulating a
connection between consumer-goods production and import of raw materials
for the consumer industries.

The senior author has elsewhere argued [8] that foreign
exchange earned by the export of West Pakistan-manufactured goods has a
high domestic cost. Much the same contention has been advanced by Hecox
[7], Islam [9] and MacEwan [11]. In these papers the relationship
between costs and earnings is usually based on fairly abstract
assumptions. The purpose of this note is to reduce the calculations to a
"plain man" level. Specifically, we try to calculate how many rupees of
indigenous resources are expended to earn each extra rupee of foreign
exchange which is received from exporting cotton textiles and leather
goods rather than their primary ingredients, namely raw cotton and hides
and skins i. Since this note was written, the Board of Economic Inquiry,
Lahore, at the request of the West Pakistan Planning and Development
Department, has undertaken a wider study applying the same general
approach used here.