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Richard Joly. NOTRE DEMOCRATIE D'IGNORANTS INSTRUITS. Ottawa: Les Editions Leméeac Inc., 1981. 239 pp.

It is one of the contradictions of our time that, in an age of internationalism, education in all countries continues to be oriented very much towards the nation state. There are two principal reasons for this predicament. The first is that education is still financed and prescribed by local, provincial and, in some cases, national governments without being exposed appreciably to the broadening influences of supra-national organizations. The second is that educational institutions are prone to resist change and, indeed, as they find uncertainty in the complexities of the contemporary world, prefer, as McLuhan says, to look in the rear-view mirror.

The expected behaviour of aggregate corporate saving is an unsettled problem that has received considerably less attention in economic research than personal saving behaviour. In part this has reflected the rather uncertain status of the corporation as a separate behavioural entity in much of economic analysis. Keynes in the General Theory emphasized personal saving behaviour, and in a brief discussion of saving by corporations, governments, and other institutions he suggested rather obscurely that their motives for saving were "largely analogous to, but not identical with, those actuating individuals.' Keynes's neglect of corporate saving was not new in the development of economic analysis, and H. G. Johnson has argued that it "reflects Marshall's inability to integrate the modern corporation into his system of economic analysis."An attempt to sort out some of the significant determinants of corporate saving is particularly important for two broad questions in economics. First, is the cyclical behaviour of corporate saving an important stabilizer? This question involves a study not only of the marginal relationship between changes in planned corporate saving and corporate income but also of the interdependence between planned corporate saving and planned corporate investment. Secondly, does the behaviour of corporate saving in our society adversely affect the allocation of economic resources? This question is important for the position one takes on whether or not government policy should be designed to increase the distribution of corporate income and thus to increase the channelling of new corporate funds through the capital market.