【正文】 e aforementioned average annual inflation rate of percent between 1880 and 1914 with the average of percent between 1946 and 1990. (The reason for excluding the period from 1914 to 1946 is that it was neither a period of the classical gold standard nor a period during which governments understood how to manage moary policy.) But because economies under the gold standard were so vulnerable （易受攻擊的） to real and moary shocks, prices were highly unstable in the short run. A measure of shortterm price instability is the coefficient of variation, which is the ratio 12of the standard deviation of annual percentage changes in the price level to the average annual percentage change. The higher the coefficient of variation, the greater the shortterm instability. For the United States between 1879 and 1913, the coefficient was , which is quite high. Between 1946 and 1990 it was only . Moreover, because the gold standard gives government very little discretion to use moary policy, economies on the gold standard are less able to avoid or offset either moary or real shocks. Real output, therefore, is more variable under the gold standard. The coefficient of variation for real output was between 1879 and 1913, and only between 1946 and 1990. Not coincidentally, since the government could not have discretion over moary policy, unemployment was higher during the gold standard. It averaged percent in the United States between 1879 and 1913 versus percent between 1946 and 1990.Finally, any consideration of the pros and cons （贊成與反對的理由） of the gold standard must include a very large negative: the resource cost of producing gold. Milton Friedman estimated the cost of maintaining a full gold coin standard for the United States in 1960 to be more than percent of GNP （Gross National Product 國民生產(chǎn)總值）. In 1990 this cost would have been $137 billion. Conclusion Although the last vestiges （痕/遺跡，蹤影） of the gold standard disappeared in 1971, its appeal is still strong. Those who oppose giving discretionary （任意的，自由決定的） powers to the central bank are attracted by the simplicity of its basic rule. Others view it as an effective anchor for the world price level. Still others look back longingly to the fixity of exchange rates. However, despite its appeal, many of the conditions which made the gold standard so successful vanished in 1914. In particular, the importance that governments attach to full employment means that they are unlikely to make maintaining the gold standard link and its corollary, longrun price stability, the primary goal of economic policy. （FROM: ）NOTE 1. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael D. Bordo is a professor of economics at Rutgers University. From 1981 to 1982, he directed the research 13staff of the executive director of the . Congressional Gold Commission. LESSON 2 THE INTERWAR PERIOD (1918 —1939) AND THE BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM (1944 — 1973)Governments effectively suspended the gold standard during World War I and financed part of their massive military expenditures by printing money. Moreover, labor forces and productive capacity had been reduced sharply through war losses. Consequently price levels were very high everywhere at the war39。s conclusion in 1918. Between 1918 and 1924, exchange rates also fluctuated wildly, and this led to a desire to return to the stability of the gold standard. The . returned to gold in 1919. In 1922, Italy, Britain, France, and Japan agreed on a program calling for a general return to the gold standard and cooperation among central banks in attaining internal and external objectives. In 1925 Britain returned to the gold standard by pegging the pound to gold at the prewar price. To return the pound price of gold to its prewar level, the Bank of England was thus forced to follow contractionary moary policies that contributed to severe unemployment. British stagflation in the 1920s accelerated London39。s decline as the world39。s leading financial center. The United Kingdom had lost a great deal of its petitiveness and attempted to contain its deficits when the balance of payments deficits and inflation were serious. On the other hand, France faced large balance of payments surpluses after the franc was stabilized at a depreciated level in 1926. As short term capital shifted from London to Paris and New York, the United Kingdom was forced in September 1931 to suspend the convertibility of the pound into gold, devalued the pound, and the gold exchange standard came to an end.The causes of the collapse of the gold exchange standard lied in the lack of an adequate adjustment mechanism, the huge destabilizing capital flows and the outbreak of the Great Depression. This also was a period when nations imposed very high tariffs and other serious import restrictions. According to Nurkse, the interwar experience clearly indicated the prevalence of destabilizing speculation and the instability of flexible exchange rates.Since a full recovery from the Great Depression of 1929 —1933 did not take place until the onset of World War II, the conditions for a formal reanization of the international financial order were not present. The depression had provided an environment in which self interested beggarthyneighbor policies encouraged petitive devaluation and increased tariff protection — followed the model established earlier by France. Since no long lasting effective devaluations were 14possible and the great interruption of world trade eliminated the gains from international trade, such an environment hindered global economic growth: all countries could not simultaneously devalue by raising gold prices, with collective action doing nothing more than devaluing money by causing inflation. When the war replaced the depression, cooperation became impossible. All countries would have been better off in a world w