ABSTRACT
In 1946 Raymond Goldsmith published an estimated balance sheet of war production of the major belligerent powers of World War II. All the major combatants of World War II faced difficult problems of balancing the input requirements of the armed forces and military supply against civilian needs. The United States economy followed its own path of wartime mobilization. Comparison of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia as convergent systems, whether 'totalitarian' or 'shapeless', fails to throw light on differences in their styles of wartime resource mobilization. For each nation, two measures of the mobilization of its national income are derived. For the United kingdom, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Germany it is the traditional measure: the ratio of officially reported or estimated defence expenditures to national income; for these countries it constitutes the upper bound on national income mobilization.
