Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the dedicated public service of officers of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, particularly those who work on the National Accounts. The bureau is under constant budgetary attack by people who would rather remain in ideological ignorance. We trust that our readers will give it political support whenever they have the opportunity.

Within the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, special thanks are due to Jane Cunningham for her work on the analysis of National Accounts data. Thanks are also due to Sonja Mazurkiewicz for secretarial assistance, and to Scribe’s publisher, Henry Rosenbloom, whose editing considerably improved the readability of the text.

Among our mentors, we are particularly grateful to John Nevile (University of New South Wales), J.E. Isaac (University of Melbourne), C.T. Kurien (Madras Christian College), and Max Neutze (Australian National University). It is not their fault that economics retreated into ideology during the 1980s. We hope that this book will help to nudge the discipline back towards the reality which they so capably represented in their work.