10 
Imports can loosen the constraint but this will be temporary 
even if equipment is imported. 
Also a budget surplus may make it possible for the growth 
rate to rise above the limits detailed just now. This surplus 
will automatically tend to appear with a high growth rate, but 
it may be counteracted by a parallel movement of increased 
public investment and spending for social services, tendencies 
which are only too natural in a growing system. 
In most industrial countries the output capacity of the 
equipment is not the bottleneck; the manpower is usually the 
narrower constraint. For this reason the high post-war growth 
rate was dependent on the supply of additional manpower from 
agriculture, from the households and from abroad. (The 
hunger for additional manpower shows that capacity was not the 
bottleneck). 
On the basis of preceding considerations we might picture the 
high growth era of the 50'ies and 60'ies as follows. On the 
basis of investment and exports there was full employment with 
high growth and utilization. The bottlenecks prevented the 
booming economy from creating excess demand and a profit 
inflation. At the same time the tendency to increase in profit 
margins in innovating and in export firms was checked by the 
action of wage drift, which kept up consumers demand and