The general trend of the economy has changed little in the past two months. There is further evidence of recovery abroad. At home, expansion continues, with industrial production rising quite rapidly. Prices have remained stable and the foreign payments position, helped by the recovery in the overseas sterling area's balance, remains favourable.

The Radcliffe Committee's Reportdoes not contain a summary. The passage below is written for those who will not have time to read the report, but want to know what it said. It is a summary without comment or criticism. It does not aim to cover the whole report, which includes long and valuable descriptive chapters on the financing of public authorities (chapter III) private financial institutions (chapter IV), the work of the Bank of England (chapter V), and on statistics (chapter X). It is, mainly, chapters VI to VIII which are summarised below: they give the Committee's views on the central question of monetary policy. At the end, the Report's main specific recommendations are listed. The references in the left-hand column are to the Report's paragraph numbers.

Only eight or nine years ago, at the time of the Korean war, it was widely believed that there would be a continuing world-wide shortage of many primary products; that there was a long-term tendency for the prices of primary products to rise faster than the prices of manufactured goods; and that, as a consequence, the terms of trade were bound to go on turning in favour of primary producing countries and against manufacturing nations such as Britain.

Wherever possible, the monthly and quarterly statistics used in the Economic Review have been adjusted to eliminate seasonal variations. This note describes the methods of seasonal adjustment and discusses how far the adjusted series can help the interpretation of current developments. The last section of the note describes an analysis of imports which, although it did not yield a satisfactory set of seasonal corrections, may be of help to others.