This article was prepared mainly by Miss C. V. Downton, while she was a member of the Bank's Economic Intelligence Department.
The historically high central government borrowing requirements of recent years, and the high interest rates at which they have been financed, have focused attention on the indebtedness of the central government with its implications for the tasks of refinancing and servicing the debt. At the same time, the upward trend in inflation since the early 1960s has distorted some of the conventional measures of the debt.
The trend of the national debt in relation to national income