Raymond W. Goldsmith

Premodern financial systems : a historical comparative study

1. Introduction 2. The financial systems of the ancient Near East 3. The financial system of Periclean Athens 4. The financial system of Augustan Rome 5. The financial system of the early Abbasid caliphate 6. The financial system of the Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman I 7. The financial system of Mughal India at the death of Akbar 8. The financial system of early Tokugawa Japan 9. The financial system of Medici Florence 10. The financial system of Elizabethan England 11. The financial system of the United Provinces at the Peace of Munster 12. Similarities and differences.

The National Balance Sheet of the United States, 1953-1980

In what constitutes a landmark in the field of national accounts, Raymond W. Goldsmith gives detailed estimates of the nations assets and liabilities year by year from 1953 through 1975 and for the benchmark years of 1900, 1929, and 1980. Special features of this work include presentation of data sector by sector, which casts light on the changing roles of financial institutions, and Goldsmiths expression of data in the form of ratios rather than in absolute dollar values, a device that makes the material both more informative and easier to absorb. The most comprehensive and extensive study of national wealth ever attempted, The National Balance Sheet will be a rich resource for researchers and users of national accounts.

The Quantitative International Comparison of Financial Structure and Development

The quantitative international comparison of financial structure and development involves three levels of problems: first, what is the purpose of such comparisons; second, given these objectives, what are the concrete features of the financial system to be compared; and, third, how are these comparisons to be carried out, that is, what data can be used and how should they be processed and arranged?

THE NATIONAL BALANCE SHEET OF THE SOVIET UNION

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the national balance sheet of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has always, apart possibly from a short period of war communism, possessed a reasonably comprehensive financial system with most of the paraphernalia usually associated with it—currency and deposit money; central, short term credit, long term credit and savings banks; and government securities and life insurance. One aspect of the financial system is much more developed and vastly more important in the Soviet Union than in capitalistic countries, the use of the banking system as a control device for the allocation and use of funds. The financial structure of the USSR is in many respects similar, at least in outward appearance, to that of more or less advanced non-Communist countries, although the similarity seems to have diminished rather than increased over the last forty years. The USSR has a central bank, the Gosbank, which issues paper money and keeps the governments deposits as central banks as many other countries do, and operates through a nation-wide system of branches and agencies.

Saving and Changes in National and Sectoral Balance Sheets

In a more detailed paper (see text for reference) the main conceptual and technical problems of the construction of national balance sheets are discussed and balance sheet ratios derived from the balance sheets of seventeen countries are compared for a number of benchmark dates varying from a decade to nearly three centuries. The chapter included in this volume deals with the share of saving in the increase in tangible and total national assets, and its determinants, in thirteen countries in the post-war period and eight countries in the period 1851–1913.

SUMNER H. SLICHTER. Economic Growth in the United States: Its History, Prob lems, and Prospects. Edited by John T. Dunlop. Pp. xi, 196. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961.

activities of the English banking system. Professor R. S. Sayers, of the University of London, in his paper on &dquo;The Role of Government and Central Bank in International Trade&dquo; elucidates those governmental activities in international trade in which the central bank has some particular responsibility-&dquo;the assessment and interpretation of the balance of payments ... [and] the encouragement of exports, a government policy deriving from a view of the balance of payments.&dquo; Sir Oliver Franks, Chairman of the Committee of London Clearing Banks, discusses the activities of the commercial banks in his paper