Investment, the Labour Market and Economic Policy

Ciaran Driver and Paul Temple

Chapter 2 in The Unbalanced Economy, 2012, pp 33-53 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract A major goal of economic policy in the market era was to transform the labour market. Far more than any other advanced economy, and beginning with the high unemployment decade of the 1980s, British economic policy has centred on the creation of a flexible labour market, to the exclusion of much else, with the exception perhaps of the search for a credible anti-inflationary monetary policy. By flexibility in the labour market we do not mean to include all policies such as skills training and the flexible use of labour within the firm — which were never a priority — but rather the process of increasing the willingness of workers to supply labour at a wage justified by the prevailing level of productivity. That approach has now become so much part of the current consensus that it is hard to recall that it displaced other more broad-ranging concerns over growth that headed the agenda in earlier periods. In this chapter, we ask how this transformation became accepted and commonplace. How did it happen that an orthodoxy emerged that downplayed — almost to the point of neglect — the positive contribution of capital investment, research and development (R&D) and technology in favour of a worldview that prioritized labour market institutional reform?

Keywords: Labour Market; Monetary Policy; Capital Investment; Real Wage; Labour Demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-27179-2_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137271792

DOI: 10.1057/9781137271792_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().