The financial development of India, Japan, and the United States

India and Japan, which found themselves at roughly the same level of economic and financial development in the 1860s, have advanced since then at strikingly different rates: India very slowly, Japan with unprecedented speed. In this book, Raymond Goldsmith highlights the essential differences between the financial structures of India and Japan and compares them to that of the United States, regarded as the prototype in this field. The data used aretaken, in the case of India and Japan, form two volumes published simultaneously (see back cover), which offer much more detail, as well as documented statistical evidence.

Goldsmith focuses on trends in investment and saving; the devellopment of money and banking and other financiasl institutions; the methods of financing households, business, and government; and changes in the structure of national balance sheets. He attempts to identify the main factors-economic and noneconomic-that have been responsible for the remarkable differences among the three countries in the relationships between theeir financial superstructures and their infrastructures of national income and wealth.