Search

Presents several labor research papers of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations in Great Britain. "The Role of Shop Stewards in British Industrial Relations"; "Disputes Procedures in British Industry"; "Industrial Sociology and Industrial Relations"; "Productivity Bargaining and Restrictive Labour Practices"; "Trade Union Structure and Government"; "Overtime Working in Britain."

The article outlines recommendations relating to the accurate use of the taxonomic aspects of ecological investigations, which are approved by the Council of the British Ecological Society. The Council hopes that the Flora and Edition which has been used in determining the taxonomic concepts and nomenclature followed in the paper should be stated by contributors to the "Journal of Ecology." The Council also encourages the preservation of material of all the taxonomic units, from each plant community described. Finally, the Council calls on contributors to state the herbarium or herbaria in which his specimens have been deposited.

The article focuses on the press and public opinion in Great Britain, discussed at the Conference of the British Sociological Association in 1955. The first influence on the policy of a paper will be its tradition, which is a vital part of its goodwill as a business. Next important factor is the readership's character and the circulation. A paper that is read standing in the train, giving special attention to the interests of women, punters and filmgoers, will not have space to inform its readers adequately about foreign affairs. Third in the list of influences in a newspaper office comes the experience, educational background, sense of responsibility of the editor and his editorial staff. Whatever the policy of the paper, their special interests and bias will be reflected in it. The next factor to consider is contact with readers. The newspaper can influence the reader by a multitude of stories, ideas, recommendations and services. The reader can only refuse his pennies. Circulation is, of course, very important. Without it advertising dies, and the paper dies with it. But generally speaking, the paper's attitude in foreign affairs will be a secondary factor in the reader's choice of reading.

This article focuses on parliamentary records in the custody of the House of Lords Record Office, which are relevant to the study of economic history of Great Britain. The records which are in the care of the Lords Record Office are the following: the archives of the House of Lords from 1497 onwards; a few, post-medieval House of Commons documents which survived in the fire of 1834 and a large proportion of the Commons records which have accumulated since that time. The sources for economic history which are to be found among these records fall into three main groups. First, those which related to the public business of both Houses and to proceedings on public Bills; second, the private Bill records of both Houses and lastly, a varied accumulation of papers laid on the Table of the House of Lords.

The purpose of Part I of this paper is to place the contribution of Guttentag-Lindsay in historical perspective and in particular to relate the entire controversy concerning the uniqueness of commercial banks to the nineteenth century dispute regarding the uniqueness of the Bank of England. My objective will be accomplished primarily by showing how closely the Guttentag-Lindsay model parallels the framework used by Bagehot. Bagehot's objectives in Lombard Street (1873) were to disabuse the politicians and the financial community of the view that the Bank of England was not unique (i.e., that it was "like any other bank"), to show in what ways the Bank was unique, and to draw the implications of the Bank's uniqueness for Bank policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on a meeting on freshwater ecology held at the Exeter, England-based University of Exeter from 3-7 July, 1964 and a meeting of the Tropical Group on patterns in dry tropical vegetation held in London, England-based Linnean Society on November 4, 1964. Series of papers presented at the meetings; Discussions on each paper; Participants of the meetings.

This paper is concerned with the estimation of an econometric model designed to test the Modigliani-Miller (henceforth MM) hypothesis. The primary interest is not in the theoretical validity of the hypothesis. The major sources of theoretical disagreement with Modigliani and Miller arise from the key role they impute to the arbitrage process and the effect of leverage on the expected value of the returns to equity through the increased probability of bankruptcy. These issues have occasioned a number of important contributions in recent years (see especially [2] and [23]). The first section of the paper provides a skeletal outline of the MM hypothesis and discusses the problems of formulating an appropriate econometric model. In the second section an econometric model is developed, which, while drawing on the ideas of several
1 This study is part of a continuing program of research into company financial behavior financed by a grant from the Social Science Research Council. I am indebted to Mrs. Eileen Sutcliffe of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of York, and Milton Chen of New York University for assistance with data collection and computer processing, and to the personnel of the SRC Atlas Computer, Chilton, the University of York Computer Center and the New York University School of Commerce Computer Center.
2 References in square brackets are listed on pp. 161-2, below.
3 In terms of the implicit aggregation procedures, the old Liquidity-Preference/ Loanable-Funds controversy has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
different writers, has certain elements of originality in the way it seeks to incorporate growth and leverage. Finally, in the third section the results of the econometric tests are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the efficiency of the coal-fired steam-generated electricity in Great Britain, the U.S. and France in 1970. The authors selected this industry for close examination because it had experienced rapid technological progress, its output is homogeneous and the data available are comparatively good. They found that the average level and rate of growth of fuel productivity in Great Britain industry were less than in France and in the U.S. The authors were careful to state, however, that technological backwardness was not the only interpretation of this result. They were aware that partial productivity measures could be very misleading because the contribution of other inputs, particularly capital, is ignored. Furthermore, this paper shows that the percentage increase in output in Great Britain from 1949-63 was higher than that in France and in the U.S., while the percentage increase in capital, measured by generating capacity, was much lower than in France or the US. This difference could be interpreted as implying that the productivity of capital in Great Britain industry was rising relatively to that in France and in the U.S. and thus that the industry in Great Britain was technologically forward. However, there are other interpretations, because capital productivity is also a partial measure of productivity. Thus, this paper suggests that there is a need a measure of productivity which reflects the simultaneous influence of all inputs and output and a production function provides such a measure. This article also estimates production functions for this industry.

Information about several papers discussed at the exhibits sponsored by the British Ecological Society is presented. Topics include the purpose of land use mapping first as a record on maps of the actual and existing land use, and the Human Settlement and land use in Snowdonia against the background of vegetation ecology in the area. The meeting featured several speakers including Dr Woodhead, Dr Reynoldson, and Mr Le Cren.

The discussion of issues in labor economics has been characterized in the recent past by a re-introduction of economic analysis.[1] There remains, of course, among many labor economists a reluctance to apply the traditional tools of economic analysis to the labor market--either on the grounds that it is repugnant to consider labor as a commodity or that the notion of a market for labor is inappropriate.
It is the aim of this paper to examine the role of one particular economic institution viz. the fee charging employment agency. The role of fee charging agencies in the organization of the labor market is a subject which has received little rigorous analysis from economists. In one of the few papers dealing with this subject Jack W. Skeels has correctly observed that whereas 'few forms of business have evoked as much persistent controversy as the private employment agency and the literature explaining private agencies is scant and treatment by authors without strong bias is even more difficult to find. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines insects infected sacks used for the storage and packing of foods in Great Britain. Details of species of insects found in sacks; Reasons for occurrence of the insect Oryzaephilus surinamensis in flour sacks; Insects found in food sacks used for the storage of waste paper.

This article presents comments on the research paper by Joseph Aschheim entitled "Supplementary Security-Reserve Requirements Reconsidered." Presented are comments on how the volume of bank deposits is regulated in Great Britain. The author states that Aschheim's analysis is "limited to supplementary security-reserve requirements with the objective of insulating bank-held government debt, in whole or in part, from the impact of restrictive monetary policies on the private credit market." Comments on the liquidity ratio in Great Britain are also provided.

The article offers information on the scheme for abstracting publications on the British Empire Vegetation. The proposed plan is to invite authors of papers and books dealing with vegetation and ecology to send to the Secretary of the Committee abstracts of their publications. It is noted that the abstracts will be collected and edited by a number of collaborators, and will then be published by arrangement with the British Ecological Society in the form of supplements to "The Journal of Ecology."

The article focuses on the task and prestige of supervisors on industries in Great Britain. There have been major changes in the tasks and prestige of the supervisor in industry in the past twenty years. These changes can be attributed to a number of different processes resulting from different causes. These processes include advancing technology and automation, increasing trade unionism of the shop floor, changes in top management philosophy, increasing standards of education of manual workers, increasing supply of college graduates into industry etc. This paper contains the results of empirical studies in a number of industries which were used to develop a method of identifying specific processes of change rather than vague directions of change. This will provide a more realistic and pragmatic approach to the problem than has been achieved previously. The material used in this paper which is presented is drawn from intensive interview programs of supervisory staff which were conducted in five factories in the period October 1969 to January 1972. The results of the study indicate that the supervisors were not involved in areas such as decision-making and planning which they had traditionally regarded as part of their job.

The article comments on the paper "The Landscape and the Machine: Technical Interrelatedness, Land Tenure and the Mechanization of the Corn Harvest in Victorian Britain," by Paul A. David, that appeared in the book "Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain After 1840," edited by Donald N. McCloskey. David contends that the slowness with which mechanical reapers were adopted by British farmers is to be explained by physical features of the farm landscape in Britain which made their adoption relatively unattractive. David's evidence for the index of the harvest differential turns out on inspection to be based on rates of pay of women workers on one farm in Northumberland. Whether this is an adequate basis for estimating the movement of the differential for (predominantly) male workers in all the corn-growing regions of England, might be questioned. Given that the critical factors determining the profitability of mechanization-cum-improvement were the incremental cereal yield and the cost of improvement, it is proper to ask whether any doubt attaches to the values David posits for the other parameters and variables composing these expressions.

In this paper we examine the effects of the policies of wage and price restraint that have at various times been employed in Britain since 1945. We have taken the two-equation model that has been studied extensively in the context of data for both the United Kingdom and the United States,[2] and have assumed that, although far from perfect, this model will be a good enough statistical description of wage and price inflation to allow it to catch any major influence of wage and price restraints. In order to see how the potential effects of incomes policies should be specified in this two-equation model, we are forced to examine the derivation of the equations in some detail. In this process we discover that shift dummies which have been used by other investigators[3] to catch the effects of incomes policies are inappropriate and that their use can give rise to misleading results. After conducting tests more satisfactory than those employing shift dummies, we conclude that the data are not inconsistent with the view that wage and price restraints have usually been ineffective in restraining inflation, and also that the restraints have sometimes actually had the effect of raising the rate of inflation above what it would otherwise have been. This perverse effect is very noticeable in the most recent periods of "restraint" since 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1955 the Board of Trade has collected annual data on the investment intentions for the following year of private manufacturing firms in the United Kingdom; and it has recently made these statistics generally available.[2] This paper investigates the determinants of these investment intentions in the manufacturing sector and evaluates their usefulness in forecasting actual investment compared with that of techniques not using anticipatory data.[3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the annual general meeting of the British Ecological Society held at the University College in London on January 6-7, 1949 and its thirty-fourth annual meeting held at Bristol University in London on January 9, 1948 are presented. Various woods and rare plants in Great Britain were discussed in the 1949 event accompanied by exhibits of various photographs of species while the 1948 meeting was about hydrography and ecology.

For what now seem to us to be obvious reasons associated with the difficulties of data collection there has been no published study of the operation in Britain of agreements which provide for the automatic adjustment of wages to changes in the official prices index. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature on collective bargaining by examining the extent, characteristics and some of the effects of such agreements in post-war Britain. This seems particularly appropriate given the recent increase in interest in indexation associated with the T.U.C.'s advocacy of a variant of the traditional form, namely cost of living 'threshold' agreements. Threshold agreements are a conditional form of indexation, somewhat akin to another variant, the 're-opening clause'. The latter makes provision for further negotiations within the period of an agreement in the event of specified changes in the prices index, but leaves the degree of compensation to be negotiated. However, our concern here is with the traditional type, that is, collective agreements which provide for the automatic adjustment of wages on a pre-arranged sliding scale basis in accordance with changes in the official Index of Retail Prices. Our survey is restricted to multi-employer agreements covering manual workers, i.e., agreements which could claim to be 'industry-wide' in a loose sense. We have not considered salaried employees or single employer agreements. The paper is arranged in the following way. The first section examines the arguments which have been advanced, largely on economic grounds, supporting and criticizing such agreements. Secondly the incidence and coverage of indexation agreements in post-war Britain is established by applying a number of measures, and the reasons for their rapid decline in in the late 1960s are considered. The third main section examines the characteristics of the agreements in a number of industries. The fourth section reports a survey of the opinions of the parties based on their experience with indexation agreements. This is followed by an assessment of their effect on real wages and wage movements in the industries concerned. The final section summarizes the major findings and presents some conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been recognized that the British unemployment figures presented monthly by the Department of Employment are biased downwards when compared with, say, the official U.S. data which are collected by a regular sample survey,[1] but in the 1966 Sample Census the unemployed in Britain were divided into those who registered at the exchanges, those who were sick and did not register, and those who did not register for other reasons. It is suggested here that the implication of the Census figures is that the dispersion of unemployment between different occupational, age and regional groups was, and almost certainly remains, less than is often believed. This paper will briefly examine the occupational, age and regional patterns in turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to assess the adequacy of the British unemployment data in the light of these criteria, looking mainly at the period 1966-1970. It attempts both to define the main gaps and shortcomings in the evidence, and to present the record of change where the evidence is stronger.
The main weaknesses of the statistics are as follows: They have seriously underestimated the downturn in the labor market since 1966. They give a misleading picture of the industrial incidence of the fall in the demand for labor since 1966. Finally they do not give us information on unemployment rates by skill level, information needed because other evidence clearly shows that the specific unemployment rate for the unskilled is much higher than the general rate. After looking at other areas in which the data are stronger the paper closes with some suggestions for improving the statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on Henry George's Remedies for Britain's Land Problems. When Henry George sailed for Great Britain in 1881, no one could have prophesied the far reaching consequences of his act. Within two yean both he and his book "Progress and Poverty," were to become household words in Great Britain. It is also true that George's arrest by the Irish constabulary in August, 1882, while he was observing conditions in the west of Ireland, and the questions subsequently asked in the House of Commons about this affair, gave him a publicity far beyond the effect of his book or speeches at this date. In his speeches George presented two main points: The social and economic condition of the British working man, and the remedy for his ills. In defining George's message to the British the author may leave out of consideration for the present the first of these points. Most British papers acknowledged the plight of the working man in the Eighteen Eighties; what George contributed in this respect was a description of conditions in unusually specific and moving terms.

The role of the taxation of economic rents in classical economics continues to hold the interest of scholars. One lacuna in the study of classical theory concerns the development of classical rent theory, which evolved from the emigration-colonization remedy that was advocated for abating the economic ills of Great Britain of the classical era. The concern of this paper is with the specific aspect of this classical discussion of emigration and colonization, which concerned the theory, and the taxation of economic rent as the classical theory was applied to colonial conditions. For here classical thought underwent a change in emphasis, a transformation often missed by contemporaries who claimed that a substantive aspect of Ricardian theory was at issue. This change in emphasis is clearly brought out in economist Edward Gibbon Wakefield's plan of Systematic Colonization and is forcefully reflected in economist J.S. Mill's great restatement of Ricardian economics some years later. In tracing this development in Ricardian economics, this paper shall consider first the relevant aspects of Wakefield's colonization plan which concerns location rents, the fiscal importance of such rents to his scheme, and the influence this had on classical economics. The concluding section sets out to explain the failure of Ricardo to develop this aspect of his theory since it was general enough to cope with location rents in lieu of differentials in soil fertility as the most important determinant of rent.

The article presents a list of documents on the economic history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of the documents listed are: "Survey of Documents in Private Keeping," by J. Ainsworth; "Clyde Company Papers," edited by P. L. Brown; "Report to the General Board of Health on Darlington, 1850," edited by H. J. Smith; "Calendar of the Irish Council Book, 1 March 1581 to 1 July 1586," edited by D. B. Quinn; "The Minutes of the Edinburgh Trades Council, 1859--1873," edited by D. F. McKenzie; "Seventeenth-Century Hearth Money Rolls With Full Transcript Relating to Co. Sligo," edited by E. MacLysaght.

This article paper is concerned with the similarity of the growth performance of the British economy during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties and with the usefulness of the "new-old" industry dichotomy in illuminating the trends of the inter-war period. The inter-war years emerge as a period of growth almost as rapid as any of comparable length in British measured history. The exact rating of the performance naturally varies slightly with the growth criterion adopted and the termini used for the other periods; the simplest way to establish the validity of the conclusion and at the same time leave it open to the reader's judgment is to draw in the inter-war trends on the Matthews graph. The similarity of the growth performance in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties is largely maintained even when activity is divided into Goods production and Service production. Services get their unity partly from their physical intangibility as final products, partly from supposed differences in income demand elasticities or productivity improvement possibilities, partly, and increasingly, from the statistical difficulties of arriving at satisfactory real output series.

This article presents various papers related to economic and industrial history, published in previous issues of different journals. In the paper "Overseas: Lending and Internal Fluctuations, 1870-1914," A.G. Ford discusses, within a theoretical framework, the mechanism of the transfer of resources overseas, and concludes that overseas lending itself largely generated the requisite balance of payments surplus on current account, by damping down home consumption and hence imports, and by stimulating exports. Rising overseas issues therefore meant rising unemployment and falling imports, and vice versa. H.W. Richardson has a go at the same field with the paper "Retardation in Britain's Industrial Growth, 1870-1913." He argues that the slowing down in the rate of growth was caused by an abnormally low rate of structural change within industry, because there was a dearth of new activities capable of taking over as leading sectors which could create whole new growth industries that could more than cancel out the stagnation of the old staples.

This section presents the highlights of a discussion on race relations during the conference of the British Sociological Association in 1957. Three main papers were read by A. H. Richmond on Theoretical Orientations in Studies of Ethnic Group Relations in Britain, by H. S. Deighton on History and the Study of Race Relations and by H. S. Morris on The Plural Society. The convenor made an opening statement on his views of the nature and possible scope of race relations studies, while professor Pear wound up the second session with a brief outline of the study of speech as a social device for classifying, identifying, and characterizing national and ethnic groups. The programme had been designed to bring a wide range of academic interests to bear up on the field, and in the event there was an interesting interplay of views from sociologists, social anthropologists, historians, and social psychologists. Among the points raised in discussion the following seem to have been of major importance. The definition of prejudice and its measurement are more difficult questions than is often realized, and any simple-minded treatment of racial attitudes can be very misleading. There was emphasis on the need for structural analysis of race relations with special reference to changes in access to political power afforded to minorities.

This article presents the highlights of a discussion on criminology during the conference of the British Sociological Association in 1957. Attendance at the three meetings of the section ranged between fifty and thirty members. The opening paper by W. Cordon Rose, reviewed the development of criminology in Britain over the last half-century in terms of its relationship to the Penal Reform movement and the growth of social studies in British Universities. In the second paper, J. C. Spencer, director of the Bristol Social Project, dealt more specifically with sociological studies in the field of criminology. Apart from a more effective articulation of studies of delinquent sub-cultures and the socialization process in the delinquent family, he underlined the need for research into the field of white-collar crime. A final paper by L. T. Wilkins, social statistician at the Home Office, dealt with the philosophy of prediction methods, a most important development in the penological field, especially in relation to the use of indeterminate sentences. Although the group contained only a minority of members actively concerned in the criminological field, the presence, of persons from other disciplines may be regarded as an encouraging sign of interest by other sociologists in the association.

Most of the existing studies on the international capital market are based on a segmented market approach. This approach treats the different national capital markets as separated entities, hardly related to each other. For this reason (under the assumption of market segmentation), comparable capital assets may differ in their return on different national markets. Although market segmentation enjoys a surprisingly large following, it is not the only possible interpretation of the international capital market. The alternative hypothesis, i.e., that prices of capital assets in the international capital market behave as if there is one multinational perfect capital market, should be considered. The one market hypothesis has the advantage of being consistent with much of the accepted economic theory. Also the one market hypothesis is unambiguous where market segmentation can stand for any number of specific imperfect market formations. Market segmentation is widely accepted as the only possible structure of the international capital market. Different currency areas, separated political organizations and trade barriers have been given as a priori evidence for the segmentation of the international capital market. This, however, is not necessarily the case. An examination of the behavior of capital asset prices reveals that the price behavior is consistent with the one market hypothesis. It should be noted, however, that a certain body of data can be consistent with both the one market hypothesis and any one of several specific forms of market segmentation. But as the main theme of this study is to show the validity of the one market approach to the multinational equity market, it is sufficient to show that one cannot reject the one market hypothesis with regard to this market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a hypothesis that resource endowment influences the composition of industries of long-term foreign investments. It examines Great Britain, which doesn't have much in the way of natural resources, and the United States, which is less dependent on importing raw materials from abroad, and examines how companies in these nations differ in their investment strategies. It states that there is a positive relationship between portfolio and direct investment in Great Britain, and a degree of domestic capacity utilization, while in the United States portfolio and direct investments are negatively related to domestic capacity utilization.

The article discusses the use of capital levy as a fiscal policy towards war debt in Great Britain from 1815 to 1840. Recent use of the levy to cope with postwar debt elsewhere has revived academic interest in the policy. After the Napoleonic wars British debt was around twice the national income. David Ricardo first suggested the idea of a levy on capital, yet it was not adopted. Among the opponents was David Hume, who believed it unfairly penalized the propertied class and that it would be difficult to administer.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the effects of fiscal and financial arrangements on the incentive to invest in ships can be calculated and to compare different arrangements. Needless to say the paper is not exhaustive, but it does at least cover those fiscal arrangements which are operative, have operated or might be regarded as possible for a British Government to adopt, and those financial arrangements which are most common in the shipping industry. The paper, deals with such fiscal measures as corporation tax, investment grants and free depredation allowances, and financing by retained profits and loan capital. In doing so it builds on previous work in this field. Of necessity the paper assumes the ultimate effects of fiscal regimes fall entirely upon the shipowning companies concerned: that they can neither be passed back to suppliers nor onwards to consumers. As long as people are concerned with fiscal regimes affecting a small proportion of the world fleet, this seems reasonable. Moreover, in the general field of the final incidence of corporate taxation there has been much study and little agreement. In addition income tax on dividends has been assumed to be a burden on the shareholders and not the company.

In the analysis of the role of trade unions in wage determination, British economists in the last decade or so have concentrated their efforts on the part played by unions in wage inflation. This paper is addressed to a somewhat different question: by how much have trade unions in Britain raised the pay of unionized manual workers relative to the pay of non-unionized manual workers? The derived estimates pertain not to a single occupation or industry, but are an economy-wide average and so, no doubt, conceal some important differences within particular sectors. Nevertheless an examination of the British experience affords a valuable opportunity to consider whether the institutional setting of collective bargaining acts as a neutral factor in determining the influence of unions on relative wages. Many observers have drawn attention to the existence in the high employment postwar British economy of two systems of industrial relations; in its Report, the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations (1968) presents a cogent, if rather strong, summary description of the characterization of the two systems. On the one hand, there are those industries where average hourly earnings (net of overtime pay) do not differ substantially from the wage rates negotiated between representatives of the employers and of the unions at the industry level. On the other hand, there are those industries (the large engineering sector being the standard example) in which actual hourly earnings are considerably in excess of the industry-wide wage rate agreements and it is in these industries that, as far as the pay of manual workers is concerned, bargaining at the plant or firm level takes on paramount importance. These differences in the industrial relations systems may imply corresponding differences in the opportunities available to unions to secure an hourly earnings differential for their members vis--vis non-union workers. To investigate this possibility, a... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a survivor technique for estimating the optimum plant size of industries in Great Britain. In applying the technique firms in an industry are classified into size classes at two dates; and size classes with increased market shares are identified. The concept of efficiency or optimality underlying the use of the survivor technique is different from and wider than that underlying the traditional analysis in the theory of the firm. Main criticism to the interpretation of survivor estimates is that success in the market often depends on factors other than those which would normally represent genuine welfare gains. These factors include, restrictive agreements and the control of scarce resources. All estimates calculated for this paper have been based on successive reports on manufacturing industry from the British census of production from 1954-68. The analysis has been applied to plants employing more than 25 people. The high rejection rate is not a criticism of the technique itself and does not invalidate the estimates shown. However, the included industries cannot be considered representative of manufacturing industries in general. Thus only two engineering industries are included--agricultural machinery and watches and clocks.

It is the purpose of this paper to inform the debate on sexual equality by reference to the economic analysis of discrimination, which has by no means figured prominently in the public discussion of the issue. This to some extent may be explained by the fact that no detailed British analysis of the economics of discrimination exists, despite a mushrooming of the American literature on the subject (which is mainly but not exclusively devoted to racial discrimination).[1] The first part of the paper attempts to analyze differences in employment activity in the labour force between the sexes and to examine how far these may explain sex wage differentials. This enables us to define more precisely what constitutes (pure) discrimination in the second section which surveys various economic models of discrimination, analyses them in terms of their applicability to sexual discrimination, and derives various propositions. In the third section statistical evidence is examined in relation to these propositions in so far as this is possible given the availability of data.[2] Finally, certain implications are drawn from the analysis in comparing the likely effects of equal pay and anti-discrimination legislation on the operation of the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implications of introducing measured daywork (M.D.W.) for the institutions of collective bargaining. The decision to introduce M.D.W. will have been taken by a single firm for one or more of its plants. M.D.W. will be replacing an existing pay system based substantially on payment by results (P.B.R.), and that the main impetus for change has come from the degeneration of this system. Management is already engaged in some form of collective bargaining, though this may mean no more than that it recognizes the unions organizing the workers concerned and deals with their shop stewards.

ADVERTISING frequently generates controversy. Few industries, however, have so much strong feeling aroused by their promotional activities as pharmaceuticals. This paper discusses some of the specific reasons why pharmaceutical promotion may provide cause for concern and tries by statistical investigation to establish whether or not grounds exist for some of the criticisms to which the industry has been subjected. The paper is in two main sections. Firstly, promotion in the industry and some of the specific arguments which are directed against it are examined. Secondly, the variables used in a cross- sectional, multiple regression analysis carried out on pharmaceutical promotion are described and the results of the analysis presented. The exercise was carried out using promotional data for the calendar year 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper presents some results of an attempt to derive a suitable function to explain unit costs in the water supply industry in England and Wales. The data we used were the latest available at the time of writing. The data, in effect, were for the year 1965-66. It was not possible, because of lack of data, to carry out a time-series analysis to supplement our cross-section findings. At the moment the industry is composed of some 331 undertakings; our sample, which is based on data provided by I.M.T.A.,' covers 162 of those under- takings. In effect, it covers: 67 local authorities; 75 water boards; and 20 water companies. In this paper then we are concerned with the derivation of an industry average cost curve, or function. Although the resulting curve could be similar to the envelope curve, or to part of the envelope curve, as we know it, it will differ from the usual conception of that curve because of the nature of production conditions in the water supply industry. Section II notes the type and characteristics of the four cost functions we have fitted to the data. Section III briefly presents and assesses the statistical results obtained from using those functions. Section IV then makes some comments on the major issue of amalgamation in the light of the statistical results.

This paper reports on attempts to explain the level of fixed investment in plant and machinery in manufacturing industry in the United Kingdom. Particular emphasis is laid on measuring the impact of various governmental incentive schemes which have been employed over the past decade to stimulate investment.[2] The approach adopted here is to distinguish between the nominal price of an asset as paid by the investor and its effective price after allowing for any applicable allowances. This effective price is then incorporated into the neoclassical investment theory developed and applied by Jorgenson [7], [8].[3] However, the formulation used here differs from that of Jorgenson in that the elasticity of the desired capital stock with respect to relative prices is not assumed to be unitary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain the behaviour of an oligopolistic market, the United Kingdom market for cars, over the late 1950s and through the 1960s. Our primary concern is to explain market-share behaviour and thus establish the form of the demand function faced by the individual firm or by the separate divisions of such a firm. Given such information, we will be able to estimate the degree of monopoly in the industry by determining the mark-up of price over marginal cost--and, thereby, make some estimate of the size of the welfare loss associated with monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with one of the most illustrious hypotheses examined under the second approach, namely the random walk hypothesis.[3] This hypothesis postulates that the changes in share prices are independent, and hence produce a random walk in price levels. Over time, however, the relative frequency of outcomes is stable. An elaboration of the hypothesis is given in the next section of this article. Recent writers have analyzed not only share price movements but also other speculative price series such as those of commodity prices. Though no universal agreement regarding the validity of the random walk hypothesis as applied to share prices has resulted from these studies, there is a surprising dearth of instances in which it has been refuted unambiguously. Thus, as Rayner has put it, the random walk hypothesis is "in the ascendant". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has applied a model of employee-management relations to the British economy and tested its implications with aggregate and industry data since the 1950s. Though the results are generally encouraging, it is necessary to stress the following cautionary notes.
1. Theoretical formulations different from that described in the first section of this paper could specify the relationship estimated in Sections II and III. The advantage of the present approach, however, is that it replaces improvised ad hoc explanations of strike activity with a behavioural model which, unlike rival bargaining models, does yield refutable implications. Amendments and extensions of the model to take account of particular institutional arrangements should improve its performance.
2. The high coefficients of determination, especially in some of the industry regressions, tend to conceal rather than reveal explanatory behaviour. The association of strike activity with the level of demand in the labour market seems established, but the significant trend terms are not themselves explanatory variables and call for interpretation. One possibility is that they are proxies for aging institutional structures increasingly unwilling or unable to accommodate the growing post-war shift in the balance of power between management and labour without the parties having to resort to the strike weapon. Other explanations have been proposed; but many are difficult to quantify in a statistical study of this kind, and the use of other methods of analysis may prove more rewarding. Certainly, in so far as the frequency of strikes is an index of the smooth operation of Britain's system of industrial relations--and surely there are many facets other than strike activity to take into account--there is nothing in the results in this paper to suggest that the mounting criticism of its performance is unwarranted.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the findings reported in this paper suggest that... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the causes and the timing of changes in the normal daily or weekly hours of work have been the subject of considerable controversy. This paper proposes to discuss each of these problems in turn. The first section deals with the causes of changes in the normal hours by focusing attention on the reasons why unions press for reductions and why employers yield to such pressures. The remaining sections provide a theoretical model to account for the unusual timing of the changes in normal hours that have occurred in Great Britain in this century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a report of the help patterns among older people and their adult children in three countries—Denmark, Britain, and the United States. The data come from interviews conducted in mid-1962 with nationwide probability samples of approximately 2,500 persons aged 65 and over in each of the three countries. Family help patterns in old age in Denmark, Britain, and the United States differ by the social class position of the older person. The class position of old people effects primarily the size of their immediate families, their family structure, and their living arrangements. While the social class of the old person effects the magnitude and direction of parent-child help, persons in every social class report that they help their children and that their children help them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study which assesses the evidence from British hepatics with discontinuous distribution outside the British Isles in relation to the history of the British flora. In this paper, British hepatics showing disjunction in their world distribution are classified in six groups including mediterranean element, disjunct-temperate element and the American element. It is concluded that the hepatics considered do not form a homogeneous group and their distribution patterns all appear to be explicable in terms of post-glacial climatic change without invoking in situ survival through glaciation.

The article focuses on the Committee Report released by the British Ecological Society regarding the relevance and implication of the paper "The classification of tropical woody vegetation types," by J. Burtt Davy. According to the authors, Davy's essay commendable work should be recognized, however, his work does not present appropriate knowledge regarding the concept and classification of tropical woody communities which only uses a mixed criteria and is not based on habitat. It also offers information on the proper approach on the classification of woody vegetation communities as well as the basic formation type and units of study.

The article presents a summary of several studies related to ecology. These include "The shingle beach as a plant habitat," by F. W. Oliver, "The pelophilous formation of the left bank of the Severn estuary," by J. H. Priestley, "On the brown seaweeds of the salt marsh," by Sarah M. Baker, and "Ecological terminology as applied to marine Algae," by N. M. Johnson. A paper on the eastern moorlands of Yorkshire, England is also presented, as well as the research paper on the ecology of Calluna vulgaris.

Throughout the 1960s both government and industry expressed concern about a continuing shortage of engineers and scientists.[1] Over the last two years the concern seems to have been rather about a surplus than a shortage. Even so, this is seen by some to be a temporary phase.[2] They point to the relatively low density of engineers in the work force of British industry and take the view that the long-term problem remains that of a chronic shortage of engineers and scientists.
In this paper we concentrate on engineers and on the question of whether or not there was a persistent shortage of engineers in the 1960s. Our definition of an engineer includes people with degree level qualifications or the equivalent (e.g. H.N.D. or membership of a professional engineering institution) and those without such qualifications who are working in jobs normally held by people with engineering qualifications. We begin by examining the approach of the manpower planners whose forecasts were one of the reasons for the concern about the shortage of engineers. Their approach, however, is very different from that of most economists and so we devote some space to a review of economic concepts of manpower shortages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manpower forecasting approach to educational planning aims to link the provision of formal education to the 'needs' of the labor market. Two major problems arise if the educational 'needs' of the labor market are not absolute, that is if substitution among various skills is possible.[1] First, conventional methods of forecasting manpower requirements by time-series extrapolation or international comparison may give biased results if the observed occupational and educational patterns reflect the influence of supply factors as well as demand factors.
The purpose of this paper is to give further consideration to the choice of criteria for selecting an optimum set of educational or occupational requirements when skill substitution is possible. An alternative criterion will be examined and compared to the one suggested by Hollister. The alternative is that of minimizing the employer's total factor cost for a given output. The conditions under which these two criteria give the same results will be explored. Then some data from Britain will be presented, suggesting in a highly qualified manner, that one of the principal conditions for the convergence of these two criteria is not being met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1962 manpower retraining facilities in the U.K. have increased almost fivefold and the government has recently announced a programme of expansion up to 1975 which will, if realized, far surpass this rate of growth.[1] This paper examines briefly the benefits that are likely to result from investment in manpower retraining. In particular, it stresses the need for flexibility and adaptability in the organization and management of a programme of manpower retraining. Against this background the U.K. system of Government Training Centres (G.T.C.s) is examined, and it is argued that there is a need for a considerable expansion in retraining effort--part of which, it is suggested, might be organized through the existing structure of the Industrial Training Boards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]