of reserves should grow at approximately the same rate as global wealth. A lower growth rate of reserves would impose undesirable policy constraints, while a higher growth rate would imply an inflationary bias to the world economy. Judging from the data used in this study, rates of increase of national wealth varied approximately 2.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent, with a cluster around the 5 per cent figure. If the behavior of the governmental authorities follows the pattern found in this study, we might assume that they will want to increase their stock of international reserves by approximately 5 per cent annually. Table 2 pre-