Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese war / by Gotaro Ogawa.

EFFECTS ON PUBLIC FINANCE

135

railway transportation. As to treating as ordinary expenditures the outlays for the purchase and manufacture of railway
supplies, there may be some doubt (in view of the fact that
expenditures for construction and improvement are not so
treated), but the purchase and manufacture of supplies being
performed as an ordinary affair, the expenses required may
conveniently be treated as ordinary. There is no doubt that
the expenditures for construction and improvement are extraordinary outlays both in the nature of expenditures and in
the practice of accounts.
During the war the expenditures for railway operation more
or less increased, due, perhaps, to busy traffic, while the figures
for purchase and manufacture of railway supplies showed a
considerable fall, as the result of a decrease in the demand for
railway materials on account of the postponement of railway
improvement and construction. Thus, the ordinary expenditures as a whole did not record any appreciable change. On
the other hand, the extraordinary expenditures for railway
construction and improvement remarkably declined. In
other words, the figures for this item, which ranged between
15,820,000 yen and 17,760,000 yen before the war, fell to sums
ranging from 8,I20,000 yen to 4,910,000 yen. Thus, the total
expenditures for government railways were reduced during the
war to amounts from 28,730,000 yen to 28,4IO,OOO yen, as
against from 35,450,000 yen to 40,730,000 yen before the war.
The striking advance in government railway expenditures
after the war was the outcome of the nationalization of railways, carried out for military and political reasons, which
required large sums for the purchase of private railways.
To summarize the effects of war on the expenditures for
government industries: a very remarkable increase occurred
in the items for the manufacture of war supplies, iron and
steel, and for printing, while the railway expenditures, particularly outlays for improvement and construction, considerably diminished.