The present study has been the result of my Ph.D. research
on China's national income accounting begun in 1960 at Edinburgh. Initially I had hoped to estimate China's national
income for the period 1958-62 based on the conventional national
income accounting system. Owing to lack of statistical data,
the project was virtually abandoned after two years most of
which period had been spent on going through the original
Chinese sources as well their English translations available to
me in the United Kingdom and, at the same time, hopefully waiting for release of more relevant statistical information in one
form or the other by the Chinese on the mainland. Th result
of those two years/ of ground work eventually took the form of
a very crude estimation of China's national income aggregates
for the period 1960-62, which is now incorporated as part of
the present study. The work on the study in its present form,
which involves a change from construction of a set of national
income accounts to applications of national income accounting
began in 1962 and the problem of non-availability of non-Chinese
national income series has been made easier through passage of
time, for the Chinese national income studios by T. C. Liu and
K. C. Yeh on behalf of the RAND Corporation and also by Y. L. Wu
and associates on behalf of the Stanford Research Institute
were available to me in 1964, which provide the necessary
empirical data to strengthen the application aspects.Research on the Chinese economy may sometimes be fascinating but the amount of ground work which needs to be done can
also be tedious, frustrating, and time-consuming for any one
individual without any assistance. The output is usually
extremely low in relation to the effort put in
