Welsh Journals

those 'America-centred' theorists, such as Abramovitz4 and Easterlin,6 who regard fluctuations in employment in the United States as exogenous determinants of changes in the rate of international migration, trade and capital flow. The case against outright atheists of the Adelman persuasion is based on criticism of their own data and buttressed by findings from the com- puter simulations of Franks and McCormick6 which indicate that a self- generating cycle could have existed and probably did. The economic manicheism of Habakkuk and Saul is refuted on the basis of a new examination of regional house-building cycles which, in the author's opinion, reinforces Cairncross's conclusion that 'the building cycle was little more than a migration cycle in disguise'. Finally, the 'America- centred' school is charged with ignoring the influence of British capital exports on American growth rates and the fact that these capital exports were affected not only by the state of investment opportunities in the United States but also by the state of such opportunities in Britain. For the general student of the period, this wide-ranging discussion of the literature on long swings is of great value in itself, although certain topics, such as the investment behaviour of non-British creditor nations, seem to be rather lightly passed over. The author is not content, however, to rest at this point, but attempts to specify a formal model of the workings of the international system based on eleven variables. The para- meters of this model have not yet been quantified, but one awaits with interest the promised further work in which they will be, since it is likely that the relative merits of 'America-centred' specifications and those of Professor Thomas can only be assessed through such an exercise. This, of course, assumes that the state of econometric technique is sufficiently advanced to deal with the problem of identifying structural relationships at this level of aggregation and interdependence with any degree of certainty. The second section of the book deals with internal migration in Britain and the United States during the last century or so, and in the third section a statistical analysis is presented of international flows of skilled manpower since 1950. This short review permits of no full account of the methodology or conclusions of these sections, but generally their burden is that migration remains a powerful and pervasive influence on the rates of change of more conventional 'economic' variables, to the extent, it is suggested, that we should be cautious about regarding the Kuznets cycle as a pattern of fluctuation whose influence terminates in 1914. Generally, this is a stimulating and informative book containing many hints for new avenues of research. The only unmitigated criticism must be of the publishers, whose presentation of the many graphs is so cramped as to render a proportion of them useless to the reader. Glasgow. MICHAEL MORRISSEY 4 M. Abramovitz, 'The Nature and Significance of Kuznets Cycles', Economic Develop- ment and Cultural Change, IX, part 3 (1961). R. A. Easterlin, Population, Labour Force and Long Swings in Economic Growth (National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, Columbia U.P., 1968). • C. M. Franks and W. W. McCormick, 'A Self-generating Model of Long Swings', Journal of Economic History, XXXI, part 2 (1971),