I. Introduction, 418. — II. Objectives of rationing, 419. — III. The nature and advantages of General Rationing, 420. — IV. General Rationing and the control of inflation, 422. — V. The effect on production, 424. — VI. The effect on morale, 430. — VII. Administrative problems, 431. — VIII. Problems in the introduction of General Rationing, 432. — IX. The problem of incentives, 433. — X. Conclusion, 434.

Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris have been highly imaginative and industrious in applying new technique of factor analysis to a broad range of economic, social, and political data as a basis for predicting future. 1 To critics of their methodology, they have replied, not unreasonably, that methodological objections apply with equal validity to all of methods other than divine revelation currently available for predicting future. Rather than debating in abstract methodological merits of various approaches to predicting future, one can put Adelman-Morris method to test: how powerful is its predictive ability? In a 1968 article 2 they rank growth potential of 73 countries, based on 29 indicators that generally measure situation as of 1957-62 or, for dynamic indicators, improvement between 1950 and 1963-64. Their ranking can be compared with actual growth between 1960 and 1965. One might expect Adelman-Morris procedure to have a high predictive power, since their analysis begins with a classification into three groups, in large part based on countries' growth performance during 1950-51 to 1963-64, so that much of the future for which prediction is tested is really part of the past on which prediction is based. Adelman-Morris classify countries into three groups with high, intermediate, and low potential for growth. These groups apparently correspond roughly to per capita increases in GNP of above 2 percent, between 1 percent and 2 percent, and below 1 percent per annum. Comparing actual growth with Adelman-Morris potential, only 19 countries out of 58 fall into appropriate category.3

Cross-country regression analysis is applied to thirty-four countries for the 1950s and fifty-one countries for the 1960s. When foreign aid, foreign investment, other inflows and domestic savings are treated as separate independent variables: (a) savings and foreign inflows explain over a third of growth; (b) foreign aid has a substantially greater effect than the other variables; (c) correlation between aid and foreign private investment is not significant; (d) only for Asia do the four variables explain much; and (e) growth is not correlated with exports, education, per capita income, or country size. Savings are highly correlated with exports and per capita income, not with country size.

The predominant ranking criterion for judging the comparative quality of economics departments has been the faculty publication record in a set of major journals.' In this tradition is a recent article which generates rankings based on volume of pages published in twenty-four top journals during 1974-78 (Philip Graves et al., 1982). Separate rankings are calculated for total and per capita contributions, and credit is accorded to the institution at which the author is employed at the time of publication.2