The book's main purposes are to determine what statistical and other information is needed to formulate both the objects and the means of government economic policy and then to ask what theoretical tools should be used in order to clarify the issues of economic policy. Inflationary gap analysis, national budgeting techniques and the theory of economic fluctuations are examined against the experience of a country in which they have been intelligently applied. The book gives a lively account of Swedish economic thinking and of the economic policy debates in Sweden since 1920, discusses the scope and limitations of national forecasting and budgeting and assesses the relative merits of general and detailed measures of economic policy.