2015년 12월 22일 화요일

[발췌: Mitra-Kahn's Redefining the Economy] 8. Keynes convinces Britain to re-define the economy, 1930-1945


  • 출처: Benjamin H. Mitra-Kahn, “Redefining the Economy: how the ‘economy’ was invented in 1620, and has been redefined ever since,” Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London. September 2011.
  • 자료: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1276/
  • REF: GDP Translation. p. 17 and many.


OF WHICH

Chapter 8_ Keynes convinces Britain to re-define the economy, 1930-1945

   8.1 Getting away from Clark's 1937 Marshallian economy
   8.2 Where GNP does not come from...
       8.2.1 Why James Meade did not invent GNP
       8.2.2 And why Richard Stone did not invent GNP either
   8.3 Keynes needs to convince the Treasury
       8.3.1 Keynes's continued involvement in National Accounting
   8.4 The importance of Keynes's redefinition of the economy


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pp.210~...

* * *

Chapter 8

Keynes convinces Britain to re-define the economy, 1930-1945


( ... ... ) In this chapter I argue that Stone and Meade were not responsible for the GNP economy but that it was Keynes who re-defined the Marshallian economy, convinced Stone and Meade to change their opinion, and then convinced the Treasury to introduce his definition of the economy as the official one. In the next chapter I will reject the contradictory claim that GNP was invented by Kuznets for the US government. ( ... ... )

   While the current literature agrees that Stone and Meade developed GNP accounting (see Comim 2001, Vanoli 2005 or Vines and Weale 2009), the argument is primarily based on secondary sources and interviews made 40 years after the fact (as in Meade 1981 or Stone and Pesaran 1991). There does not seem to be any systematic primary source study of who developed GNP and it became the government's preferred definition by 1941. This chapter uses primary sources to follow that development through Cambridge in the 1930s and Whitehall during the war to paint a completely new picture not only of GNP, but of Keynes the economist, the civil servant and person. In that process I re-introduce a young Richard Stone and James Meade to the history of economics, both hired to implement Keynes's definition of the economy.

   Tily (2009: 352) argues that Keynes was an inspirational force in developing British national accounting, setting out the first sector accounts, as "a leading and demanding advocate, user, and producer, of economic statistics." I go a lot further in this chapter, arguing that Keynes rejected Clark's Marshallian economy, convinced Stone and Meade to change their opinion on the economy, convinced the government to change its position on the publication of national accounts, and in so doing, he changed the official British definition of the economy.


8.1 Getting away from Clark's 1937 Marshallian economy  (p. 211)

Collin Clark had published the standard work on national income estimation in 1937 defining the economy along Marshallian lines.
  • National income was the total income of private individuals from market activity, or the expenditure of private individuals on investment and consumption.
  • This was consistent with the work of Bowley, Stamp and Flux, 
  • and it excluded government activity quite explicitly.
This section argues that while Keynes used Clark's empirical estimates he disagreed with Clark's definition of the economy, in particular that idea that government expenditure was not a final output. Keynes formulated his argument with the assistance of a young German scholar whose "contribution─modest it is true─to British national accounting seems to have been forgotten" (Cuyvers 1983: 629). On 2 October 1939 Keynes wrote the Cambridge Statistician Erwin Rothbarth [n. 4] asking him to collect data on national income, and savings in particular, to argue for the need for better war financing, possibly through forced saving (Cuyver 1983: 630, footnote 1). [n. 5]  Keynes used these figures in "a brilliant lecture," according to his wife's diary (Moggridge 1992: 629), to the Marshallian Society Lecture (20 October 1939) and in his articles for ^The Times^ on the 14, 15 and 28 November 1939 (Cuyvers 1983: 630). Rothbarth found that the saving figures and the total investment figures clashed with some of Clark's definitions (Rothbarth 1939, 29 Nov). This problem was caused by the increased share of government in national investment.

   Rothbarth and Keynes started a very active correspondence on the definition of savings and investment in relation to Clark's focus on the private market. Based on this correspondence, Rothbarth published an articel in ^The Economic Journal^ only a month later, undersigned by Keynes. [n.6]  This article (Rothbarth and Keynes 1939) used the data collected by Rothbarth, as well as Clark, but departed from Colin Clark's definition of national income in a significant way. Rothbarth and Keynes argued that the real point of national income was to estimate the total taxable income in the economy, not just private income earned for consumption and investment. In discussions with Kaldor, as noted by Marcuzzo and Rosselli (2005), Keynes reiterated his "hostility to [Clark's] Gross National Income. But it is only through conversations with you and Rothbarth that I have been forced to try and diagnose clearly, exactly why my intuition was so much revolted by it." (Keynes 1940, 25 Feb).

   Keynes was so much revolted because he needed to estimate the government's revenue required for the military effort, not private consumption and investment. Clark's procedure for calculating national income did not include final government expenditure.
  • As Kaldor wrote Keynes, "you [Keynes] mentioned that one of your reasons against this procedure is that it overestimates the extent to which a reduction in consumption, or private investment, 'releases' resources for other purposes" in particular "equipment goods for War purposes" (Kaldor 1940, 6 Feb). 
  • If government expenditure was not included in the national income, then investment for the war effort would officially count against economic growth. The more the government spent, the less was available for private consumption and investment, thereby reducing national income. For Keynes, the ability to tax and fund the war was of paramount importance, and to him, the government seemed a valid consumer of final output. So government should be considered part of the economy.

   What mattered for taxable income was the total expenditure on goods, of which government spending formed a large part, esp. in times of war. Keynes and Rothbarth carried on an extended exchange of letters from December 1939 and December 1940 to make this point empirically (KCA W/4/17-75). They debated the exact shape and form of a national account in terms of equations for the total national income and expenditure accounts. ( ... ... )

   Rothbarth and Keynes (1939) broke away from Colin Clark in their national income estimate of £5,700m. This £5.7bn included investment in new capital (£250m) and investment to maintain current capital(£420m) just as Clark's figures had. Unlike Clark's national income, the account added "government expenditure, central and local, including 'transfer' incomes such as pensions, unemployment relief, and the interest on the national debt" totaling £1,300m (Rothbarth and Keynes 1939: 626). The final stone of the now familiar C+I+G+(X-M)=Y was laid out, and government spending was part of the economy and national income. Colin Clark had worked with a definition of the economy approximating C+I+(X-M)=Y,[.] Keynes and Rothbarth added the government.They reasoned that this total signified "Gross taxable income... [and] it is the most useful concept for our present purposes," as opposed to Clark's focus on private expenditure, national income should include all potential output that could be taxed and this included the government's own expenditure (Rothbarth and Keynes 1939: 627). Keynes himself noted that the reason for the difference between him and Clark's results were not statistical, but conceptual:
The difference between the figures [Clark's and Keynes's] are often due, not to discrepant statistical estimation, but to different ideas of what it is convenient to mean by 'national income.' It is therefore of more practical importance than usual to distinguish the differences of logic and definition, some of which hark back to old-established controversies, from real discrepancies in statistical estimation. (Keynes 1940b: 60)
   Keynes and Clark had different ideas of what national income meant. Where "Colin Clark's Gross National Income is most misleading for most purposes and not practically useful for any," Keynes's national income could, according to him, be used in a practical manner to prepare for the war (Keynes 1940, Feb 25). In March 1940 Keynes published "The Concept of National Income: A Supplementary Note" as "Mr. Clark's Gross National Income seems to me to lead us into water which is unnecessarily deep" (Keynes 1940b: 65). The paper delineated Keynes's difference from Clark, and ( ... ...). [n. 7]

   ( ... ... )

   ( ... ... )

   Keynes distinguished between the National Output and Taxable Income concepts, moving away from Clark's concept of national income. The relation between the two was simple arithmetic as the taxable income of £5,300 equalled the "National output £4,850 million plus transfer income £500 million minus Government trading profits £50 million" (Keynes 1940b: 61). With these published clarifications, Keynes wrote and published ^How to Pay for the War^(1940), thanking Rothbarth for his contribution in the introductin. Here Keynes outlined the double entry national accounting system which included now familiar equalities defining national income: C+I+G+(X-M).

   Tily (2009) notes that the 1940 accounts were also split into the now familiar sub-accounts of government tax and spending (G=T), investment and savings (I=S), and the international balance (X=M) and used the income method of national accounting. This analysis "broke new ground ... [and] amounded to 'GDP at factor cost', the measure that would underpin the National Accounts for the next 50 years" (Tily 2009: 350). Keynes had gone from being a supporter to a creator of national accounts, and while he was not the only person supporting national accounting, he was the only person to define the national income and economy in this manner in 1940.


8.2 Where GNP does not come from...  (p. 215)

   It would be another two years before the American government published a GNP account (Gilbert, M. 1942a) and another year before the British Government released its first official GNP account (HM Treasury 1941). ( ... ... ) This section will argue that, in fact, neither Meade nor Stone developed GNP as a concept or an accounting framework. Instead they were hired to implement Keynes's framework; they discarded their own theories and adopted Keynes's definition of the economy.

   ( ... ... ... ... )


8.4 The importance of Keynes's redefinition of the economy  (p. 232)

   ( ... ... ... )

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