ABSTRACT
The twenty-four member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) together account for some two-thirds of the world’s entire output of goods and services. They include the major industrialized powers and all the developed states, other than the Republic of South Africa, outside the centrally planned countries. (See the list of OECD countries on p. xviii.) In recent years they have consumed almost one-half of the world’s steel output and well over one-half of its aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, and nickel output. Over most of the postwar period, their dominance of world metal markets has been even more pronounced. The OECD countries, as chapter 1 points out, are also largely responsible for the break in the long-run growth of world metal demand in the early 1970s.
