1048 PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - 28 
Thus, so far as the original 1959 growth rates are concerned 
the projections shown on Table II are based on the same 5% 
and respectively 3% figure as the projections presented on 
Table I. The actual domestically financed 1959 investment 
of the Underdeveloped countries is estimated in Table I at 
$18 billion, while in Table II at only $11 billion. Accordingly, 
the implicit estimate of the capital-output ratio, b,, falls from 
3.76 on Table I to 2.56 on Table II. 
With any given absolute amount of investment, the lower 
is the capital-output ratio, the higher must be the rate of 
growth. This explains why in the third projection on Table IT 
with a base year transfer of $15 billion, the Underdeveloped 
countries attained — over the ten year period, 1959-1969 — 
an average annual growth rate of 5.4%, which is higher than 
the corresponding growth rate of the Developed Areas, shown 
to be 5.2%. 
A comparison of the implicit capital-output ratios of the 
two areas throws light on the plausibility of some of the base 
year estimates from which the different sets of projections have 
been derived. For example, in Table VI, b,=3.15 and 
b, =5.64. It seems to be quite unlikely that the average capital 
intensity of production would be so much higher in the less 
advanced than in the more advanced areas. A combination 
of a high growth rate for the Developed, with a low growth 
rate and a high investment figure for the less developed Areas 
must be rejected as implausible. This throws considerable 
doubt also on the validity of all the four alternative projections 
of future economic growth presented on Table VI. 
For reasons similar to those described above, or for some 
other reasons, a critical examination of the alternative factual 
assessments of the state in which both groups of countries 
actually found themselves in 1950 might lead some experts to 
reject, out-of-hand, some other of the 24 different proiections 
presented in these tables. 
The examination of all the alternative projections of the 
prospective growth of the two groups of countries over the 
113] Leontief - pag. io