A note on figures and terms
Anyone attempting to explain economic changes has little choice but to use the statistical information provided by governments, business organisations and international institutions like the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This book is no exception. But readers should be warned that some of the most commonly used figures can be misleading in important respects.
Figures for economic growth, in particular, are not as clear cut as they sometimes seem. The growth they usually measure is of marketed output. But a lot of the human labour that adds to people's well-being is not marketed. This is true of the domestic labour of women and, to a considerably lesser extent, men. It has also been true historically of much of the family labour on peasant land. The result is that there is a false impression of increasing wealth as households begin to pay for things they used to produce outside the market-when a housewife gets a job and buys ready to cook meals, or when a peasant family pays someone else to build a shed on their land where previously they would have done the job themselves.
Such changes lead the usually provided figures to give an increasingly distorted picture with growing marketisation and the feminisation of paid labour in recent decades. The officially provided figures also exaggerate the real rate of growth of the things that satisfy human need by counting in output things like financial services which merely move wealth from one pocket to anotheragain a particularly marked phenomenon in recent decades.18 Finally measurements of output per head cannot be equated, as they are all too frequently, with human welfare, since the output is always unevenly distributed between classes. Nevertheless, for want of anything better, I have had to use such figures.
Introduction
17