ABSTRACT

I must begin with a confession: my title is intended to be a bit misleading-a play on words. For when I refer to ‘the wealth of nations’, the title of Adam Smith’s famous book, I am using the expression ‘wealth of nations’ in the modern sense of the stock of national net worth, whereas he means the flow of the annual produce or essentially what we now mean by national income (except that, in contrast with the modern western practice, he maintains that services should not be included in income).