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There has been an ever-growing stream of books, pamphlets and articles on how to achieve and maintain employment, as of September 1944. It has become quite impossible for economists to read all these recipes, mainly because they all say more or less the same thing. They nearly all agree that the way to keep up the level of national employment is to keep up the level of national expenditure. In one way and another, national expenditure was permitted to increase in a number of countries, and some measure of recovery was achieved in the process. The reason for the recovery was not always understood, it was attributed to cheap money, an unbalanced budget, raising of tariffs, devaluation of the currency, increasing the general price level and so on, by the countries adopting these various measures. It was not realized that it was only in so far as the measures taken involved an increase in the total volume of spending in the country concerned that they could raise its level of employment at all and that in itself a rise in prices, far from promoting recovery, diminished the effect in stimulating employment of a given increase in spending. The article talks about the recent British government report on employment policy. There is nothing particularly novel about any of the measures recommended in the policy, nor do they involve any revolutionary change in economic practice or organization. What is new is, first, that the government there accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment and second, that the various measures proposed are commended as part of a single coherent plan.

This paper documents a significant association between the exposure of an individual or area to the UK government's austerity-induced welfare reforms begun in 2010, and the following: the subsequent rise in support for the UK Independence Party, an important correlate of Leave support in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership; broader individual-level measures of political dissatisfaction; and direct measures of support for Leave. Leveraging data from all UK electoral contests since 2000, along with detailed, individual-level panel data, the findings suggest that the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for austerity. (JEL D72, F15, F60, H53, I38) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence of the role of globalized banks in transmitting financial stresses to the real economy during the global financial crisis. A novel dataset is constructed from quarterly balance sheet reports provided by all UK-resident banks to the Bank of England. I find that the shock to bank funding from non-resident creditors was transmitted domestically through a significant reduction in bank credit supply. Resident subsidiaries and branches of foreign-owned banks reduced lending by a larger amount than domestically-owned banks, while the latter calibrated the reduction in domestic lending more closely to the size of the funding shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various papers on monetary policy, that were published in the May 1, 1953 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." Economist Harry G. Johnson has outlined very well the postwar monetary measures that have been taken by the government of Great Britain, particularly since the advent of the Conservative Government. The unpegging of the Treasury bill rate and the raising of Bank rate are clearly in accord with lime-established procedures. It is his belief that the qualitative controls which have been retained and in some instances strengthened, have been more effective in preventing an expansion of bank advances than have the quantitative measures. One of the economist comments on the idea of neutrality in monetary policy, as presented by economist Henry C. Wallich in one of his paper. The policy of pegged interest rates was obviously a policy of intervention or interference in the money market. There are a great many people to whom the idea of government intervention, even intervention by the monetary authority in the money market, is repulsive. So it must have seemed attractive and useful to describe the alternative policy as one of nonintervention, of allowing natural forces to work in the market-in short, as a policy of neutrality.

This paper provides new estimates of the macroeconomic effects of tax changes using a new narrative dataset for the United Kingdom. Identification is achieved by isolating 'exogenous' tax policy changes using the Romer and Romer narrative strategy. I find that a 1 percent cut in taxes increases GDP by 0.6 percent on impact and 2.5 percent over three years. The findings are remarkably similar to Romer and Romer narrative estimates for the United States, reinforcing the view that tax changes have powerful and persistent effects. 'Exogenous' tax changes are also shown to have contributed to important episodes in the UK business cycle. ( JEL E23, E32, E62, H20, H61) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets. Our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas, while preserving tractability. We estimate that labor markets are quite local, as the attractiveness of jobs to applicants sharply decays with distance. Also, workers are discouraged from searching in areas with strong competition from other job-seekers. However, as labor markets overlap, a local stimulus or transport improvements have modest effects on local outcomes, because ripple effects in job applications dilute their impact across a series of overlapping markets. (JEL J61, J64, R23, R58) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on each of these margins. We apply this analysis to the evolution of hours of work in the US, the UK, and France and show that both the extensive and intensive margins matter in explaining changes in total hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that the optimal gasoline tax for the U.S. is more than double its current rate, while that for the United Kingdom is about half its current rate. In this paper we derive the second-best optimal gasoline tax, disaggregating it into components that reflect external costs of congestion, accidents, and air pollution (local and global), as well as a Ramsey tax component that reflects the appropriate balance between excise taxes and labor taxes in financing the government's budget. Based on a detailed assessment of evidence on underlying parameter values, we apply the formula to the U.S. and U.K., thereby illustrating why, and to what extent, the optimal tax may differ across countries, and under what circumstances, if any, current rates might be justified.

This paper attempts to estimate returns to education using a new data set of identical British twins. It reports results on 1,364 identical twins, 428 of whom comprise 214 identical twin pairs with complete wage and schooling information. The major criticism of within-twin-pair estimates is set out by John Bound, Gary Solon and David Neumark. There are three other new contributions of this paper. First, data exists on twins' exam and reading scores. Second, there is data on smoking at ages 16 and 18 in which the authors investigate whether smoking is a valid instrument for education. Third, information exists on the differences in schools and school classes attended. Evans and Montgomery show that smoking is highly correlated with educational outcomes and use it as an instrument in estimating returns to education. Turning to the within-twin-pair differences, in conventional wage regressions the selection problem is that the observed sample consists of individuals with a high wage plus low-wage individuals with a positive wage shock.

The article presents a list of research papers on foreign economic history. Some of the research papers are "The Influence of the Manufacturers Upon the Early Policies of William Pitt," by W. Bowden, "The Huterian Communities," by B.W. Clark, "The Rise of the Rural Standard of Living in the Punjab," by M. Darling, "Notes Sur Let Russie: Faits et Obsercations Économiques," by B. Ellacheff, "The Sale of Corn in the Nineteenth Century," by C.R. Fay, "China in Transition," by D. Torrance, "The Economic Function of the Rhine," by J. Levainville, "Propaganda Argentina en AmÉrica," by I.R. Moreno, "The Agrarian Phase of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920," by H. Phipps. "The Economic Activities of the Falkiand Islands," by C.F. Jones, "Our English Villages," by L. Ernle, "The English Workingmen and the American Civil War," by J.H. Park, "Financial and Monetary Policy of Great Britain During the Napoleonic Wars," by N.J. Silberling, "The Maritime and Rural Life of Norway," by C. Vallaux.

We discuss firm-level evidence based on UK data showing that within-firm pay inequality--wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs--increases with firm size. Moreover, within-firm pay inequality rises as firms grow larger over time. Lastly, using wage data from 15 developed countries, we document a positive association between aggregate wage inequality at the country level and growth by the largest firms in the country. We conclude that part of what may be perceived as a global trend toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in the size of the largest firms in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a view of the postwar trade. In the paper titled "A British View of Postwar Trade," the author presents one personal set of reflection on a problem that must concern all economists who think about the postwar. Differences in degree of importance attaching to international trade in affecting the level of employment and the productivity of the factors of production, variables, which determine the size of the national income, do exist between countries. While it may not be true to say that "trade, to others a thing apart, is England's whole existence," yet England is high in the list of countries whose welfare is bound up with prosperous, free-flowing and expanding world trade. The degree of Great Britain's dependence on world trade is significant for the readiness; with which enlightened self-interest will dawn and efforts be made to play a part in restoring world trade. It would be superfluous to argue about the economic merits of the territorial division of labor in conformity with the principle of comparative advantage. Instances, in which British and American economists have fallen from grace by thoughtlessly, even irresponsibly, depredating the virtues of international trade in the modem age are rare; and no good purpose would be served by indulging in recriminations.

Many real matching markets are subject to distributional constraints. These constraints often take the form of restrictions on the numbers of agents on one side of the market matched to certain subsets on the other side. Real-life examples include restrictions on regions in medical matching, academic master's programs in graduate admission, and state-financed seats for college admission. Motivated by these markets, we study design of matching mechanisms under distributional constraints. We show that existing matching mechanisms suffer from inefficiency and instability, and propose a mechanism that is better in terms of efficiency, stability, and incentives while respecting the distributional constraints. (JEL C70, D61, D63) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use confidential UK corporate tax returns data to explore whether there are systematic differences in the amount of taxable profits that multinational and domestic companies report. I find that the ratio of taxable profits to total assets reported by foreign multinational subsidiaries is one-half that of comparable domestic standalones. The majority of the difference is attributable to the fact that a higher proportion of foreign multinational subsidiaries report zero taxable profits. I document how the estimated difference is related to profit shifting and show that using accounting data leads to much smaller estimates of the difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We ask whether the US government should replace its current discounting practices with a declining discount rate schedule, as the United Kingdom and France have done, or continue to discount the future at a constant exponential rate. We present the theoretical basis for a declining discount rate (DDR) schedule, but focus on how, in practice, a DDR could be estimated for use by policy analysts. We discuss the empirical approaches in the literature and review how the United Kingdom and France estimated their DDR schedules. We conclude with advice on how the United States might proceed to consider modifying its current discounting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across-cohort differences in educational attainment. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find the reforms did not affect health although the reforms impacted educational attainment and wages. Our results suggest caution as to the likely health returns to educational interventions focused on increasing educational attainment among those at risk of dropping out of high school, a target of recent health policy efforts. (JEL H52, I12, I21, I28) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical estimates of marginal tax rates have frequently been made in the U.S., but much less commonly in Great Britain. The need for such information would seem to be just as great and so it may be the complications of British tax arrangements, the form in which the British data are presented or the relatively greater frequency of tax rate changes in that country which have deterred investigators in the past. This paper presents the first results of some investigations into the marginal rate of personal income tax, including surtax. It is hoped to follow up these results with those for other taxes at a later date, but personal income tax is a sufficiently important element in the Great Britain's tax structure for the conclusions to stand on their own. The method is to make estimates of marginal tax rates on the basis of time series and to check these by their predictive power. Subsequently cross-section data are analyzed and the possibilities of using the U.S. methods with the data of Great Britain or of using quarterly data are explored.

The article investigates the policy-making behavior of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). The MPC comprises five “insiders’ who are full-time executives with the Bank, and four “outsiders” with part-time, non-executive roles. Majority votes of the MPC determine interest-rate policy. The authors present specifications and estimates for aggregate and individual interest rate rules, followed by analysis of how well reaction functions detect heterogeneity in MPC voting. They conclude that, in general, no significant differences in voting patterns exist between insiders and outsiders.

The article discusses the dynamics of unemployment in Europe. Individuals may be classified as employed, unemployed, or out of the work force, and the authors seek to determine how flows across these three categories affect unemployment rates in Great Britain, France, and Spain. They discuss circumstances peculiar to each labor market and present analysis that shows for each country how the inflow rate contributes to unemployment volatility, as well as transitions among the above three classifications.

The article presents an empirical analysis of premium bonds (PB) from the United Kingdom (UK). The author examines the UK premium bond, a lottery-linked savings (LLS) program that the British government has offered since 1956. Instead of paying traditional interest, LLS programs allow savers periodic chances to win money or prizes. The author states that LLS combine a riskless return of principal as well as a risky additional payment in the form of a lottery drawing. The author examines the correlations between PB sales, gambling activity, and a measure of savings activity.

This article uses time-diary data from the 2000 Time Use Study in Great Britain to investigate how parents' time spent in child care differs with their marital status and other characteristics. The paper examines differences among married, cohabiting, and single-parent families. The household production model indicates that single-parent households may differ from married and cohabiting households either because there are fewer time resources or because there are fewer opportunities for economies of scale or specialization in household activities. The analyses incorporate schooling measures, local unemployment rates, and regional indicators. Information on the age and health status of family members is incorporated to capture needs.

International trade collapsed, and also became much less multilateral, during the 1930s. Previous studies, looking at aggregate trade flows, have argued that trade policies had relatively little to do with either phenomenon. Using a new dataset incorporating highly disaggregated information on the United Kingdom's imports and trade policies, we find that while conventional wisdom is correct regarding the impact of trade policy on the total value of British imports, discriminatory trade policies can explain the majority of Britain's shift toward Imperial imports in the 1930s. (JEL F13, F14, F54, N74) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of intergenerational wealth transmission in economic inequality. A British study in the twenties by Josiah Wedgwood related the probated wills of a sample of wealthy men to the wills of their fathers, it was followed a generation later by a similar study by C. D. Harbury. He portrayed the father-son wealth association by displaying the wealth distribution of fathers of a given group of wealthy sons. Harbury and Wedgwood present bivariate percentage frequency distributions which make possible a two-variable regression analysis. The only special problem confronting a U.S. analysis is the decentralized location of fathers' wills. However, Harbury found county court officials very cooperative in searching files and sending photocopies of wills. Other important factors are mother's and in-laws' wealth, and the actual amounts inherited individually by each decedent son. The wealth of the decedent could be interpreted as a proxy for the advantages offered to prospective heirs by favorable environment, educational opportunity, gifts, etc., made possible by family wealth. A strong association would explain, for example, the apparent feebleness of estate and inheritance taxes in reducing inequality. Another important contribution that could be made by a match-up of estate tax returns with heirs' income tax returns is to isolate the importance of the direct material inheritance and the effect of the tax on the estate.

The article focuses on "Radcliff Report," that presents a pioneering analysis of Britain's financial system, in which the monetary system and money are considered as only part of a complex, but integrated, structure of financial institutions, assets, and markets, and in which monetary policy, debt management, and fiscal policy are treated as coordinating techniques of a general financial policy aimed at regulating spending through this financial structure. This Idealized report sees the level and structure of interest rates, which are the immediate targets of financial policy, determined partly by the whole range of financial assets the level by the relation of liquid assets including money, to holdings of financial and physical assets, and the structure to the composition of financial assets and for these components, with expectations playing their role in both cases. This unanimous report was published in August 1959. This was followed in March 1960 by four volumes of evidence. The first of these, "Minutes of Evidence," is a huge, 980-page, double-column tome of the hearings. The other three volumes "Memoranda" contain papers submitted by various groups and individuals.

This article comments on an article by Kenneth M. Wright, titled "Dollar Pooling in the Sterling Area," recently published in the journal "The American Economic Review." The author states that the article is a useful and interesting account of the policy declarations and statistical results of the "dollar pool" which has been functioning in the sterling area. However he finds his interpretation of the position of the British colonies in the pool's operations to be misleading because it ignores certain important conditions that underlie the financial results tabulated in the Balance of Payments White Paper. He further states that the central error in Wright's argument, however, is his insistence that the automatic consequence of contributions to the dollar pool was a corresponding export of capital by the colonies to the United Kingdom. In reality the two processes of regulating dollar expenditures and acquiring London assets are quite distinct. The colonial recipients of dollar exchange pay it into their bank and receive an equivalent amount of sterling which they are free to spend for any purpose except prohibited imports.

It has been the purpose of this paper to examine empirically the determinants of manpower allocation in Great Britain during the period of Labor planning, from 1945-49. Using the cotton textile industry for close study, it was found that the available data support the hypothesis that relative wage improvements were the primary factor accounting for the recruitment of manpower. However, some of the observed improvement in manpower in the cotton industry is also accounted for by such external factors as immigration. The evidence with respect to the alternate allocative devices, exhortation and compulsion, not only indicates failure to use these devices effectively, but also that in a democratic society under peacetime conditions it is virtually impossible to rely on these devices for socio-political reasons. The hypothesis that relative wages were the primary manpower allocative mechanism suggests that in the event of future manpower planning under peacetime, full employment conditions, some central wages policy will be necessary in the Great Britain.

The article discusses the trend of public employment in Great Britain and the U.S. During the last half-century, governments almost everywhere have become far stronger influences in economic life. The paper attempts to provide a quantitative picture of certain aspects of this powerful drift. It is primarily concerned with Great Britain, but it includes some comparisons with the U.S. The measure of size, which has been studied, is the number of persons employed by governments in Great Britain considered in relation to the size of the British labor force. These data are traced for a sixty-year period. They are analyzed so as to distinguish employment at central and local levels and in various functions and they are compared with similar measures for the U.S. In 1891, less than 4 per cent of the working population was employed by government at all levels, central and local, in both civilian and military capacities in Great Britain. A period of rapid expansion in the size of government was opening. Nevertheless, 1890 does not represent the beginning of the development from which the structure of the modern British state emerged. That development started well over a century before and in some of its aspects, of course, much earlier still.

As war prosperity brought an end to the worst depression in history, there was general agreement that preparations should be made to prevent a similar disaster in the future. Even the wartime government of Great Britain, despite its basically conservative character, accepted as one of their primary postwar aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment in the 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy. In the U.S., the same movement led to the passage of the Employment Act of 1946, with its obligation to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power. Although one of the things to be contained in the economic report provided for by the act is a review of economic conditions during the preceding year, there is nothing else in the act which specifies the period to which recommendations are to apply. But the author believes that most economists have from the start felt that the basic function of the council was to prevent serious depressions such as that which struck in 1929.

The White Paper, "Statistics Relating to the War Effort of the United Kingdom," presents an immortal picture of unique human achievement, the complete mobilization of a free democracy without the loss of major liberties, for active combat. Although these statistical data cannot hope to reveal the attendant physical and psychological strain and dislocation of family life, they do indicate that Great Britain's brilliant record was achieved only by severe drafts upon the national capital, in life and in property, and by the imposition of a mortgage on future output in the form of new international obligations. In the face of virtual bankruptcy, Great Britain is challenged to provide her citizens with a fuller, healthier, and happier life than they have ever experienced in the past. The recent Labor Party landslide focused national and international attention upon the necessity for the nation to conceive an economic policy dedicated to the achievement of increased national efficiency.

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. New results are also presented on the pay of CEOs in the United Kingdom. We show how improved measurement of pay points to a stronger pay-performance link than previously estimated. This link is stronger, and more symmetric, for those firms in which institutional investors play a larger role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on intrahousehold time allocations has assumed that housework is a necessary evil and focused exclusively on the causal role of opportunity costs. In fact, agents likely act to maximize happiness, and preferences regarding even mundane household chores differ considerably. I use information from the 2000-01 UK Time Use Survey to examine time spent on laundry, ironing, cleaning, and food shopping. Joint multivariate analysis of his and her time on weekend and weekday days as well as maid service reveals that her opportunity cost of time matters more than his, but that his preferences play a greater role than hers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents research investigating the term structures in interest rates within the government bond market, highlighting the role of price pressure. Introductory information is given describing the "preferred-habitat" theory of bond selection and advocating its application within standard economic theory. Two economic case studies are provided through the preferred habitat method, including the 2004 British pension reforms and the U.S. Treasury buyback program of 2000-2001. Long term interest rate shifts which occurred in response to these events are illustrated and explained through the paradigm.

The article focuses on the impact that intellectual property rights has on innovation. It examines empirical data of significant changes to patent protection on 60 nations with the highest total gross domestic product according to the International Monetary Fund. It compares the patent information with patent information for Great Britain, which has a relatively constant patent policy. It examines the standard deviation of stock returns during an estimation period and weighs the observation by the inverse of the standard deviation when undertaking a regression analysis. It mentions there was a lack of positive impact when patent protection was strengthened.

The article discusses how intellectual property rights (IPR) and patents affected the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The author comments on how technological innovation and change may require the marginalization of IPR and discusses how Britain's patent system provided incentives to inventors. He notes debates regarding access to information and 18th-century attitudes toward monopolies. Costly filing procedures for patents in Britain are noted. The author suggests many inventors declined to utilize the patent system during the Industrial Revolution for reasons of principle.

The article discusses the administrative foundations of self-enforcing constitutions. The authors state that the challenge to reform under a constitution is that no theory exists that articulates the conditions under which constitutional rules successfully coordinate behavior. The authors display the relevance of the administrative-power view of constitutionalism through the examination of the experiences of the City-State of Venice, Italy and of England. They found that administrative power determined which rights were an equilibrium outcome and which constitutional rules were self-enforcing.

The article discusses the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the role of trade with the New World in explaining the growth of productivity and income during this time. The authors use a formal computational general equilibrium (CGE) model to test this. They explain that the impact of the Industrial Revolution stemmed from its joining together of technological advance with the military power. This power created access to the markets of Europe, the Americas, and the East for Great Britain. The authors examine what the British Industrial Revolution would have looked like had trade been restricted.

The article reports on financial policy in Great Britain during World War I. The underlying principles of wartime finance were developed by Britain's chancellor of the exchequer Reginald McKenna. The theory expressed is that McKenna's policies sought to avoid passing debt to future generations, but that a negative feature was a low consumption to output ratio. McKenna called for higher taxes and a debt retirement path which linked interest with all finance on government debt. Chancellors Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain followed McKenna and continued his fiscal policy. Owners of capital were targeted with the highest taxes.

In this paper the authors begin by describing the labor-market behavior of individuals around pension age. They also consider the coverage of the various parts of the social-security system. The authors go on to explain the structure of state pensions in the United Kingdom and compute the incentives for retirement that the structure creates, focusing on early retirement and the role of disability benefits, which are especially relevant for lower-skilled workers. The authors compare these incentives with those facing workers with private occupational schemes who now make up the majority of older workers close to retirement. The structure of incentives is found to match well with the observed patterns of labor-market participation in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is routine for growth economists to appeal to the British industrial revolution as motivation for their papers. This overview draws implications from this important experience for how economists think about growth, empirical growth economics, and policy based on recent historical research. The update it provides may also help to improve the plausibility of future economic interpretations of early industrialization. Technological change is, of course, central to the years 1760-1830, a period to which economist Thomas Ashton attached the label first industrial revolution. Thus, it is not surprising that new growth models of the endogenous-innovation variety are much more helpful for the analysis of this period than those that envisage endogenous growth without explicit reference to total-factor-productivity growth. It follows that it is important to consider Great Britain's social capability for growth that is the impact of institutions and policy choices on TFP growth, rather than simply focusing on investment in human and physical capital. Data for the measurement of key economic characteristics and, especially, for the estimation of growth rates are highly imperfect.

This paper compares two approaches to the analysis of economic data: the exclusively econometric approach recommended by Hendry and Ericsson and the more eclectic approach that we employed in our books Monetary History and Monetary Trends. It concludes that the article by Hendry and Ericsson is mislabeled. Their article is not in any relevant sense an evaluation of our "empirical model of U. K. money demand." Rather, it uses one equation from our book as a peg on which to hang an exposition of sophisticated econometric techniques. Insofar as their empirical findings do bear on ours, they simply confirm some of our principal results and contradict none. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates an empirical model of U. K. money demand developed by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz in Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom. Testing reveals misspecification and hence the potential for an improved model. Using recursive procedures on their annual data, we obtain a better-fitting, constant, dynamic error-correction (cointegration) model. Results on exogeneity and encompassing imply that our money-demand model is interpretable as a model of money but not of prices, since its constancy holds only conditionally on contemporaneous prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors' comments on research papers by economists Cotton Lindsay and Bernard Feigenbaum on a model of rationing by waiting lists published in 1984. These authors say that since the inception of Great Britain's National Health Service in 1948, interpretation is a difficult matter. Almost by definition, waiting lists are for conditions that are capable of waiting. This produces a very biased concentration of waiting lists, a feature consistent with Lindsay and Feigenbaum. Waiting lists relate mainly to certain surgical specialties and are of minor importance for medical specialties. Crude waiting list figures are unreliable and include individuals whose admission has been delayed for domestic or medical reasons, as well as some who no longer require in-patient treatment. Some indication of the actual composition of lists can be gained from a recent review of an orthopedic waiting list. The review revealed some surprising evidence concerning those waiting for more than a year to be called as in-patients at a large district general hospital of the 950 potential patients involved in the review, a preliminary record search revealed 20 percent had already been treated and, of the remaining 757, a postal questionnaire indicated that only 48 percent still wanted the operation. The others had either died, moved away, received treatment or were non-respondents.

This article presents a study which focused on the economic aspects of involuntary savings through unanticipated inflation in the U.S. In consequence, at least in the first instance, individual consumers have no possible means of distinguishing relative price changes from absolute price changes. Consequently, there is a mass illusion that all goods are relatively more expensive so that, as each consumer attempts to adjust his purchases, real consumption falls, and if real income is maintained, the saving ratio rises. Certainly, as mistakes are discovered, attempts will be made to rectify them, but if inflation continues to accelerate and if expectations lag behind reality, the saving ratio will remain abnormally high. By a similar argument, a decelerating rate of inflation will be associated with an abnormally low saving ratio. This situation experienced in the U.S. can be compared to the economic condition in Great Britain. For neither country is the coefficient on the rate of growth of real income very different from that on the inflation variable. If the two parameters were identical, the model would relate changes in the savings ratio solely to changes in money income. There are also the income and substitution effects between present and future consumption induced by changes in the real rate of interest.

For women, as for men, it is the ownership of wealth and the acquisition and maintenance of income which together determine their economic position. This paper attempts to establish, so far as available information permits, the nature of the existing economic situation of women in Great Britain, as of May 1976, to explore the reasons for the position, and to examine, tentatively, factors which may lead to changes over the next decade. Accurate estimates of the distribution of wealth are notoriously difficult to calculate, but according to the recently published report of Great Britain's Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, in 1927 women in England and Wales owned 33.1 percent of total wealth, the figure rising to 42.2 percent in 1962 but falling again to 39.4 percent in 1973. In the year 1973 there were 20,400,000 males aged 15 and above and 22,800,000 females aged 15 and over. In the same year it was calculated by the Inland Revenue Department of Great Britain, that total personal wealth in Great Britain amounted to $163,900 million, distributed among 19.1 million wealth holders. Of these wealth holders 11,009,000 were men and 8,131,000 were women, and of these 4,087,000 or approximately 63 percent of the men, as compared with 4,316,000 or 52 percent of the women.

The article presents comments of economist Jonathan R.T. Hughes and Herman E. Krooss on research conducted by Lawrence Harper and Peter E. McClleland on Navigation Acts related to British Imperial Policy and its effect on colonial America. It is suggested that Navigation Acts had no important economic consequences, on the revolutionaries of Colonial America that could be measured by known evidence and quantitative techniques. Harper estimates that the burden of British policy was from $2 millions to $7 millions, depending upon whether one accepted his minimum or maximum estimates. Krooss comments on McClelland's papers by saying that it is refreshing and short and it avoids the worst sophistries of Occam's Razor and resorts to the fundamentals of simple economics. Disagreements among historians involve much more than the dollar-and-cents direct costs of the Navigation Acts. The "cement of empire" and the "ubiquity of smuggling" are the issues that remain arguable. As McClelland says, "What remains obscure is the motivation for colonial Indignation." And precise methodology and the right numbers do not cast any further light on this essential obscurity.

The purpose of this paper is to assemble and present in comparable form some statistics available on professional incomes in a number of Western countries. Professions selected are law, medicine, dentistry, the higher civil service and higher learning, countries are Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States. My interest in professional incomes has been aroused by the alleged and often cited connection between economic growth and the advance of democracy on the one hand and the worsening economic status of the intellectual and professional classes on the other. This trend has been noted not only in the United States but in most Western countries, it explains the springing up, all over Western Europe, of organizations of intellectuals and university graduates, aimed at defending their interests and drawing the public's attention to their plight. In Canada between 1911 and 1951, the income of professional people is estimated to have risen only one quarter as fast as the income of industrial workers, in Germany, over a period half as long the average income of the free professions is said to have risen by half as much as the income of the rest of the economy. The same trend, though less pronounced, is present also in Great Britain, where, between 1911 and 1956, the average income of the liberal professions has risen by two thirds of the rise in the national income per head of occupied population.

This paper attempts some free-ranging, loosely linked observations about aspects of nationalized industry in Great Britain and draws some parallels and contrasts with American industrial corporations. It pretends nothing in the way of a systematic survey, and, although taking off in Britain, it spends as much time here as there. In the Queen's speech, Britain's new Labor Government formally declared its intention to nationalize steel. The Loyal Opposition forced a division, and forthwith, by a precarious margin, Labor's decision was bound and sealed. The government is now committed to nationalize steel in some manner and degree. Graphically, Labor, holding a bear by the tail, has painted itself into a corner. It can wait for the paint to dry, but the bear will still be there. In the United States, in the meantime, the Administration and steel are eyeing each other warily. In the United States, private ownership of steel has never been displaced, and no displacement is even in long-run prospect. The industry has had its skirmishes with antitrust.

Differences between underdeveloped and industrialized countries in labor productivity usually are so marked that one can take their existence for granted. When, however, the contrast is between two industrialized countries, such differences are less obvious and for any particular industry, often uncertain as to direction. International productivity comparisons sometimes are regarded as indicators of the relative effectiveness with which countries allocate and utilize their resources. Output per man or man-hour measurements ignore capital inputs which are equally with labor a real cost, albeit less easily measured. They ignore the fact that differing demand structures might require somewhat different types and qualities of product. They neglect the fact that differing resource conditions sometimes require different techniques of material handling and fabrication. It is conceivable, in some instances certain, that conditions in two countries so diverge as to call for quite different methods and organization of work. Where therefore one's concern is with the effectiveness with which resources are being used, what is needed are not man-hour output figures or even data covering direct and indirect expenses reduced to some unit of real cost. Ideally, what is needed is some notion of optimum resource use and the degree to which practice falls short of attaining it.

The article focuses on income shares of upper income groups in Great Britain and the U.S. The recent National Bureau publication by a professor, Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings, has provoked considerable comment among economists and laymen alike. The National Bureau study has clearly indicated a marked decline in the personal income share of the top 5 per cent of this country's population in recent years, which for its magnitude and persistence is unmatched in the record. It is proposed to raise two questions in assessing the apparent decline of upper-income shares: whether the decline of the income share of upper-income groups is a unique experience of the U. S.; and to what extent has the disposition of corporate profits affected these income shares. In an attempt to answer these questions the first section of the paper points up some similarities and difference of the British experience as compared with that of the U.S. The second section is intended to show that there has only been a relatively small decline in the private income share of upper-income groups in recent years, and that the marked decline in personal income shares can be largely attributed to changes in corporate income positions and dividend policies.

This article focuses on the impact of British approach to the transportation problem in the U.S., as of May 1950. Be that as it may, it would be difficult to observe the British experience and avoid considering it a sort of test-tube experiment the results of which should provide some indication of what people might expect if a transport act were to be passed by the U.S. Congress. The financial results thus far have not been as favorable as those for which that Labour Party of Great Britain may have hoped, but neither have they been favorable for the United States railways under the system of private ownership and operation. The British found it necessary to raise railway rates; so did the railways in the United States. British railway labor asked for higher wages; so did railway labor in the United States; and if labor were to make its choice on the basis of improvement in its position since the World War II, it seems obvious that private ownership and operation has much to commend it.