ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades the global scale of economic activity has nearly tripled. In 1950, the goods and services produced throughout the world were valued at just over a trillion dollars. By the early seventies, they were worth nearly three trillion. While it has been more fashionable to focus on the population explosion of the postwar period and the resultant growth in claims on resources, clearly there has also been an enormous growth in individual consumption of goods and services in much of the world. The combined effect of these two trends has been an overall growth in consumption that causes the global economy to double every sixteen to eighteen years.
