A. DEMOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC STATISTICS OF MANDATORY PALESTINE

This appendix provides quantitative documentation of the basic patterns of demographic change and economic activity in Mandatory Palestine's Arab and Jewish communities and in the country as a whole. Its objective is twofold: to present the evidence underlying a good part of the observations and analyses offered in the main text, and to serve as a convenient quantitative reference source for readers interested in the economic history of Palestine in the twentieth century. The areas covered are: population and labor (tables A. 1–A.5); output and value added by industry (tables A.6–A.18); domestic and national product (tables A.19–A.22); and investment and capital (tables A.23–A.26).

Prime sources for the material collected here are the compilations of demographic and economic figures that were collected, constructed, and published by the major “producers” of statistics in the Mandate period: the government, the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut and also individual statisticians and economists affiliated with these institutions. Other essential building-blocks are provided by a number of later studies including, among others, Sicron (1957a, b), Szereszewski (1968), and Bachi (1977), which contain systematic estimates of demographic and (mainly Jewish) economic measurements.

Some of the following tables, particularly in the demographic area, bring together data – at times slightly amended – that were scattered in various primary and secondary sources. But the major part of this appendix, namely the output, value added, and investment figures, consist of newly constructed estimates for the Arab economy, which are incorporated with analogous estimates for the Jewish economy (mostly revisions of Szereszewski's [1968] series) and for the government, into a consistent system of ethno-nationally divided accounts of production and investment for Mandatory Palestine.