Irving Brecher - Böcker

How and how far foreign aid has affected Pakistan's industrial performance is the fundamental question of this study. It examines the history of aid flows to Pakistan; their interaction with economic growth and planning in the country; the role of foreign aid in the balance of payments and external indebtedness; and the reciprocal links between aid on the one hand and income, employment, investment and the structure of Pakistani industry on the other. The assistance programmes of selected donor countries and institutions are emphasized, with a view to explaining the aid-giving process and tracing its effects on various segments of Pakistan's industrial activity. The authors conclude that the flows of aid have been particularly significant during the second five-year plan. They also reach conclusions about the impact of the flows on Pakistan and the implications of this experience for aid policies in general.

In this careful and thorough study of a Canadian field which has been relatively untouched in recent years, Dr. Brecher records and comments on the development of monetary and fiscal thinking in Canada in the inter-war period, and its impact on public policy in the federal sphere. Examining Canadian opinion about economic theory during this time, the author draws on four fields of thought: that of government and other public officials; of businessmen, such as bankers, and their views on what should be done about the depression; of the "radical group", such as those prominent in the formation of the CCF and Social Credit parties; and of economists, prominent in the universities.Dr. Brecher points out in his preface that his inquiry is rooted in the conviction that the problems associated with cyclical fluctuations remain sufficiently complex to make an understanding of the developments of the twenties and thirties an indispensable condition for effective stabilization policy. He finds the twenties distinguished only in the superficial and imperfect diagnosis of and remedial suggestions for unemployment, made chiefly by a relatively small handful of thinkers associated with the Progressive and United Farmers movements, then emerging in the West. It was the thirties which, under the impact of the depression, witnessed the first real stirrings of careful economic analysis in cyclical terms, and of statistical techniques for measuring the value of annual productive activity and income receipts in the Dominion.The author has attempted to appraise the evolution of the Canadian policy of monetary and fiscal stabilization within the thought environment in which it was conceived and implemented, and on the basis of the standards set by modern income-employment theory.