The British Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956, states, in Section 21, that “a restriction accepted in pursuance of any agreement shall be deemed to be contrary to the public interest unless the Court is satisfied” of one or more of certain specified circumstances. Thus, the onus of refuting the general presumption that restrictions on competition are against the public interest is placed on the parties to a restrictive agreement, and the arguments they may employ (or circumstances they may seek to prove) are stated in the legislation. One such argument or circumstance is given in Section 21 (1) (b): “That the removal of the restriction would deny to the public as purchasers, consumers or users of any goods specific and substantial benefits or advantages enjoyed or likely to be enjoyed by them as such, whether by virtue of the restriction itself or of any arrangements or operations resulting therefrom.” If the restriction passes through this, or any other, “gateway,” the “tailpiece,” or balancing procedure must still be faced, as the Court must be “further satisfied (in any such case) that the restriction is not unreasonable having regard to the balance between those circumstances and any detriment to the public or to persons not parties to the agreement (being purchasers, consumers or users of goods produced or sold by such parties, or persons engaged or seeking to become engaged in the trade or business of selling such goods or of producing or selling similar goods) resulting or likely to result from the operation of the restriction.” Thus, if an agreement, for example, convinces the court that it meets the “specific and substantial benefits or advantages” requirement of 21 (1) (b), it will be found not contrary to the public interest only if it also survives the balancing test in which any public detriments resulting from the agreement may be taken into consideration. These, in brief, are the guide-lines given the Restrictive Practices Court by means of which it performs its obligation to pluck, from the class of all restrictive agreements, those presumably few agreements from which the public derives, on balance, a benefit.

In the Western world economic planning refers to various forms of programming the economic activity of a country under government initiative and supervision. Economic planning is thus more than government intervention; it requires the participation, on a voluntary basis, of private economic agents and governments at various levels. It works more or less through market mechanisms and essentially implies an interaction in the formulation of plans between individual economic agents on the one hand, and governments on the other.

Economic planning has two major economic effects:

1. It reduces uncertainty by making forecasts about economic conditions and by providing market information (market conditions, prospects, expected behaviour of economic agents, etc.). These forecasts are more or less detailed and are made public. This aspect of planning we call the information effect.

2. It modifies the content of economic decisions both in private and public sectors either because new goals of economic policy are formulated and accepted, or because government intervention acquires a new dimension. The result is a change in the economic structure of the country. This aspect of planning, the intervention effect, is not discussed in the present paper.

The purpose of this study is to develop a procedure for estimating changes in the coefficients of an inter-industry input-output matrix. Every attempt to prolong the useful life of such a set of coefficients carries an obvious practical interest. We desire to find a procedure which does not call for large quantities of supplementary data, and which does not require more than a reasonable volume of calculations.

The method is applied to a sixteen-industry Canadian input-output matrix for the year 1949. This matrix is an aggregation of the forty-two-industry table published by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. The adjustment of the coefficients (i.e., their up-dating) is done for 1956. Thus, the objective of the study is to estimate the 1956 matrix of input coefficients.

Projections of the output of each of the sixteen industries for the years 1950–59 using the unadjusted 1949 matrix of input coefficients and estimates of the actual final demand for these years produce discrepancies between the projected outputs and estimates of actual output which quickly become too large to be tolerated. The projection errors for 1957–59 are shown in columns 3, 7, and 11 of Table I, where the 1949 matrix is referred to as matrix A. It is the fact that the quality of these projections deteriorates as one moves away from the base year that led us to examine various methods of up-dating the base-period coefficients. Although at first glance it may seem inappropriate to use a matrix for projections eight to ten years away from the year to which it refers, it should be kept in mind that input-output tables are frequently at least five years out of date by the time they are published. For example, it is unlikely that the table for 1961 presently being constructed by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics will be published before 1967.

In his celebrated book, Money, Interest and Prices, Professor Patinkin took the position that an individual's demand for nominal balances was not homogeneous of the first degree in the absolute level of prices. His analysis, based on concepts of inferiority and superiority with respect to real cash balances, failed to distinguish between short-period transition and long-period equilibrium. For this failure, Patinkin was taken to task by Archibald and Lipsey, who, while accepting Patinkin's assumptions, showed that as between alternative positions of long-period equilibrium when the actual stock of real balances is equal to the desired stock, a doubling of the price level does, in fact, double the nominal quantity of cash balances demanded, thereby validating the classical position.

My primary purpose is to show that it is unnecessary to assume, as do Patinkin and his critics, a unique relation between the desired stock of balances and the flow of commodities. This stock-flow equilibrium should not be assumed, but rather can be deduced, as is done in capital theory, from initial assumptions. Indeed, the accumulation of cash balances to attain a long-run equilibrium level is properly treated as an aspect of the theory of capital accumulation. Specifically, if we assume that real cash balances have positive carrying costs and that the rate of time preference is zero, we can show that an individual in long-run equilibrium will hold the satiety level of cash balances and that the equilibrium is unique and stable.

Few questions are more vexing in the development of an optimum tax structure than that of allocation of tax sources between federal and territorial governments in a federal system. The need for a substantial degree of uniformity in tax structures and burdens in the interest of optimum resource allocation, effective tax administration, and tax compliance conflicts directly with the need for fiscal autonomy on the part of the territorial governments. The result is inevitably a compromise, and in many countries, including Canada, an unstable one, with constant complaints leading to frequent review of the system. Attainment of an optimum solution is difficult at best, and in the older federations, such as Canada, the United States, and Switzerland, change is impeded by tradition, by the doctrine of states' rights, and by the reluctance of one level of government to surrender any of its control over taxation to another level. A review of the solutions to the problem adopted by three federal systems in British tropical Africa, all of relatively recent origin, is of interest both in terms of African problems and for the light which it may throw on the search for better solutions elsewhere.