Although there was no balance of payments problem of the familiar kind in 1970, the year proved conspicuously unsuccessful in other respects. So far from leading on to a period of well-sustained economic growth, declining unemployment, and steadying prices, the hard-won struggle to ‘make devaluation work’ instead brought in its wake a period of accelerating price rises, a wage inflation of virtually unparalleled intensity, and a declining pressure of demand. This combination of ‘nominal’ inflation and ‘real’ stagnation was aptly named ‘stagflation’.

After rising slightly between the second and third quarters, output in the economy as a whole seems to have stagnated in the fourth quarter. Because of the dip in the first quarter of the year, however, output in the second half of the year as a whole may have been 2½–3 per cent up on the first half (at annual rates). The course of the industrial production index has been affected by strike activity, making it more difficult to use as a base for estimating GDP. But taking the average of the three months' figures in the fourth quarter (there were erratic movements month to month), and comparing it with values for base periods less affected by strikes than was the third quarter, gives a figure for GDP which suggests that output in the economy as a whole was stagnant in the last six months of 1970. The recent rise in unemployment is consistent with this picture.

Table 1 shows a set of cost and price indices, indicating their percentage rate of change in the four most recent years and their trend rate of increase in the preceding seven.

The industrial situation in 1970 was dominated by slow growth, almost stagnation in some sectors, combined with a rapid rate of cost inflation and the worst record of labour relations since the war, resulting in stoppages, go-slow and work-to-rule actions.

Last February we suggested that the aggregate volume of national output (GNP) of the member countries of OECD would rise in 1970 by 3 per cent and the dollar value of world trade by about 9 per cent. We now estimate that the rise in output was appreciably below our forecast, at about 2½ per cent, but that the rise in the value of world trade was probably as high as 15 per cent, which would mean that it was the biggest since the Korean War 20 years ago.