ABSTRACT
The spectacular increase in international trade since the war has been one of the great success stories of the postwar period. Since 1948 the volume of world trade has grown thirteenfold-much faster than the growth of production over the same period. Yet in the early postwar years there was no expectation of such an outcome. Between 1913 and 1938-or indeed 1948-the volume of trade had grown only by about 10 per cent and there was little prospect of a return to what seemed then the remarkable growth of the years before the First World War when world trade grew nearly fourfold in forty years.
