BRITAIN’S WEALTH

Hokitika Guardian, 17 January 1931, Page 6

BRITAIN’S WEALTH

CAPITAL OF £24,445,000,000

Untilin'* national capital lias how reached an estimated total of £24,445000.000 gross and £18,045,000,000 net. Those are new figures, given hv Sir Josiali Stamp in his inaugural address its president of the Royal Statistical Society, at the Royal Society of Arts, London.

The figures are subject to a statistical approximation, or “extreme margin of possible doubt,” of £1.350.000,000. Sir Josiali said his studies showed that we had spent the whole of our natural savings for about six years following 1914. and lost a quarter of our foreign investments. We had then saved somewhere about £450,000.000 a year for the next eight years. There had been no detailed investigation or computation of national capital since his own for 1014 of £14.310,000,000.

All subsequent references to national capital had been based on this, with rough modifications and additions. It had been well-nigh impossible, he said to construct a post-war estimate with any success until recently, be : cause over no period had the conditions remained stable for sufficiently long. The effect of the excess profits duty, and then the effect of the inflation and the slump of 1920 the return to the gold standard and the recent collapse in prices, were all contributing factors A number of new and baffling problems had arisen which the old methods were inadequate to deal with properlyt

Tbe restrictions of rents, housing subsidies. and large Governmental expenditure on roads, all raised curious problems of valuation. But the most important of all was the proper treatment of the collossal National Debt, the old method of merely deducting the National Debt from the value of State property being no longer appropriate. The Guy Medal in gold was presented to Mr A. W. Flux by Sir Josiali for distinguished services to statistical science.