Preliminary information suggests a further rapid rise in output during the first three months of this year, with final demand (excluding stockbuilding) moving up appreciably faster than in our February forecast. Our own estimate (table 1), based on the movements of industrial production, retail sales and the visible trade returns, is that GDP rose by around 2½ per cent compared with the average level of the second half of 1972. The implied growth rate of the economy is, for the time being, around 6 per cent per annum.

Later information confirms our February estimate that real economic growth in the OECD area last year was around 5 3/4 per cent. Our figure for 1973 has, however, been raised further and now stands at 7 per cent. Consumer demand should again be very strong and though housing investment is likely to increase more slowly, and even to flatten out in the United States, business investment in Western Europe has become much more buoyant in the last six months or so. Some slowing down still seems probable in 1974.

In October 1972 the Government published a discussion document, the Green Paper Proposals for a Tax-Credit System, which sought ‘a way to simplify and reform the whole system of personal tax collection and, at the same time, to improve the system of income support for poor people’. In this article we discuss some of the implications of the proposals for the distribution of income support, the effects on personal incomes, both in cash and kind, the cost of the proposals and how this might be met, and some aspects of the resulting tax and social security system.

Future demand for domestic appliances in the United Kingdom has been considered in two previous articles in the National Institute Economic Review. The first, published in 1960, discussed prospects for the new decade; the second, which appeared in 1967, first compared the original forecasts with actual developments up to that time and then provided a fresh appraisal of the outlook, extended to 1980. The present article contains a further reassessment, covering the same period, in the light of more recent experience.