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Rh of a sacrifice of efficient methods in favor of hand-labor and spread-work procedures. Rather, it appears highly desirable to obtain a maximum 1 physical production of needed facilities by the most efficient mechanical methods, applied at reasonable wage and hour levels, and to obtain thereby the fullest stimulus to the recovery of private industrial processes and resulting indirect employment.

Effect of price inflation.—Another important indication of these data is the measure they afford of the probable effect of the construction volume-price relationship on the feasibility of post-war construction. It will be noted that no construction volume in the entire series, other than the extreme volume induced by war activity in 1942, operated to elevate the price of highway construction above the levels obtaining in the middle thirties, which were largely generated by a sacrifice of mechanical efficiency. This record gives considerable assurance that a large program of public construction can be undertaken after the war at any level below that of a wartime economy without serious reduction of the employment value of the expenditure by price inflation.

Direct and indirect employment.—The total employment value of any public highway construction program consists in the primary employment created at the job sites and the secondary industrial employment resulting from the use of equipment, materials, supplies, and transportation services. Both in the direct and indirect groups, wage and hour conditions tend toward a natural variation with general economic conditions. These natural variations affect the relative volumes of direct and indirect employment as well as the total employment in the same manner that construction prices are affected by the total volume of construction.

Table 28 shows, for three past periods, the combined results of these several variants in the amounts and costs of direct and indirect highway employment provided by a construction expenditure of $100,000,000, all of which is eventually translated into salaries and wages.