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unemployment should be adopted. The way in which part-time employment has grown is analysed in ‘Employment. Pay and Part-Time Working’ by A. Budd and P. Smith. They also explain how this development this is incorporated in the forecasts. The effects of fluctuations in relative prices on production are the subject of ‘Unemployment. Scrapping and Factor Prices’ by B. Robinson and K. Wade. They conclude that if high wages result in production becoming uneconomic and capital being scrapped. s subsequent change in factor prices does not immediately lead to new investment and new jobs. In the introduction to the volume. the hope is expressed that the articles will be of value to professional economists and students. Such hope has certainly been fulfilled. for the papers provide an excellent guide to current applied macroeconomics. They are also of direct interest to those forecasters who are sceptical of the usefulness of econometric models in policy analysis. Kenneth

Holdrn UK

Uniwrsit_v of Liivrpool.

Karl Heinrich OppenlSnder Economic Activity (Gower.

and Giinter Poser. eds.. Business Cycle Surveys Aldershot. UK, 1986) pp. 674, f35. $50.00.

in the Assessment

of

This is the most recent in a long sequence of publications devoted to reporting the proceedings of the CARET Conference. These confcrcnccs cmphasise the use of business and other tendency surveys, in a variety of roles within economic forecasting and modclling. What this prcscnt volume shows yet again is that thcrc is a wide range of potential applications of this information. Unfortunately. the volume also reveals ;I wide variation in quality of the papers prcscntcd at the Confcrcncc, and though it contains reports on some interesting work, as a whole the book mu.\1 bc used sclcctively. In outline. the contents arc divided into five parts, coinciding with the sessions of the confcrcncc if we exclude the opening panel session. The first conccntratcs on the uses of Icading indicators in forecasting. with papers ranging from reports on cxpcrisnccs with Icadin, 0 indicators of OECD, some methodological issues with the use of survey methods, and tests of their success in forecasting inflation. The general impression is that though leading indicators have a useful role in forecasting it is a limited one. This same generally sccptical note is also sounded in the assessment of survey information. The evidcncc is that the quality of their input is not good, often there is little correspondence between actual and expected series. The next section considers the general question of deriving empirical measures of uncertainty. and assessing the contribution direct survey information may play in this. Alternatives include cross-section dispersion. or time variance measures, and a number of altrrnative empirical techniques with their attendant problems are reviewed here. In one of the more successful sections of the book, the questions raised are of considerable importance, e.g.. whether uncertainty is correlated with inflation, making relative/absolute price changes difficult for individuals to disentangle, and thus provoking real output/employment effects as inflation changes. The third section deals mainly with the use of consumer sumeys. A number of interssting questions are raised in some of the papers here. includin g the explanation of changes in the savings ratio implied by consumer surveys and the often contradictory results obtained by time series analysis. Also of considerable interest are the further illustrations on the role of qualitative: data on expectations. in time series applications. The translation of this to quantitative data has a fairly long history, following the stimulus of Prof. Carlson’s use of qualitative data for expected price inflation. Much of the discussion in the present volume however. provides reservations about the usefulness of this derived information. In practical examples it is often the case that fairly naive tima series models