Progress in Balancing the National Accounts

Abstract

It is a great pleasure for me to be able to contribute to this volume in honour of Colin Clark. Colin is one of the key links in the long thin chain of political arithmeticians that stretches back to William Petty, and his work was the main inspiration for mine. Indeed I owe him more than inspiration. He was my teacher at Cambridge and we became close friends. When in 1937 he left England for Australia he passed on to me the running of a little monthly called Trends, which appeared as a supplement to Industry Illustrated and for which he had been regularly compiling time series of output, consumption, investment, foreign trade, employment, prices and other indicators of economic performance. I continued in his footsteps and it was in this way that I sharpened my claws as a national accountant.KeywordsNational IncomeNational AccountEconomic ProgressSocial Account MatrixBlue BookThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.