Industry

Abstract

Apart from Table D1, which gives synthetic indices of overall industrial production, and Table D15, showing the number of cotton spindles, all the tables in this section relate to the physical input or output and the volume of external trade of major commodities which possess an adequate degree of homogeneity to allow aggregation and meaningful comparisons between countries. Inevitably, these are mostly basic commodities: raw materials or manufactures at an intermediate stage, rather than finished goods; yarn and cloth rather than clothing; metals rather than machinery (of which the only example included here is motor vehicles). The picture that this selection of statistics is likely to give of industrial development is necessarily biassed and partial. Until recent decades there is little that could be added to them in the way of continuous statistical series for the output of finished products, though perhaps a little more could be done for external trade.