ABSTRACT
One of the earliest efforts of the United Nations in the economic field, which has been outlined by Brookfield as a key to international ‘development’ initiatives, was a drive to create a vast improvement in national statistical services in Third World countries, and to back this with a system of international statistical collection, standardization and reporting.1 The drive was initially sponsored by John Maynard Keynes, and his continuing influence led to the trend to aggregate national income through estimates of Gross National Product (GNP) and other measures, at the expense of income distribution within the country.2 National income data became available for a large number of countries and territories by the late 1950s. The World Bank, which in 1956 shifted to lending mainly to Third World countries after its initial post-war emphasis on Europe and South Africa, led the way to the unfolding of a series of development plans, based on the new data; and this obviously gave a boost to
the formalization and standardization of national accounting procedures.
