Where Britain Went Wrong

Robert Bacon and Walter Eltis

Chapter 1 in Britain’s Economic Problem Revisited, 1996, pp 1-34 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Those who seek to manage economies or advise on their management are either tinkerers or structuralists. Tinkerers believe that a country’s economic ills can be cured by adjusting demand, the exchange rate or the money supply, and by persuading workers to accept periods of wage restraint. Structuralists are concerned with the underlying structure of economies, and believe that tinkering about will not suffice where this is out of line. Treasury civil servants are generally tinkerers, and they usually seek to put things right by adjusting what they actually control. Many politicians are also tinkerers, and indeed in many economies minor adjustments to this and that are all that is needed to produce highly satisfactory results. In these economies — West Germany, Japan and recently France are examples — the underlying structure has been such in the past fifteen years that government control of effective demand, the money supply and the exchange rate were really all that was needed to produce an economic environment where businessmen and workers could co-operate to increase wealth and real incomes at very rapid rates.

Keywords: Trade Union; Money Supply; Profit Margin; Market Sector; Successive Government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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:978-1-349-24613-7_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349246137

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-24613-7_1

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 ().