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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.

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 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.

The article analyzes the existence of an eight-year generating cycle in the U.S. agricultural system. According to the author, the eight-year cycle in the crops have persisted from 1760 to 1918, which have induced derived cycles of prices which are reflected and verified in the century of Sauerbeck index numbers of general wholesale prices. Pieces of evidence presented by the author include the analysis of a century of prices and a paper on "A Comparison of the Fluctuations in the Price of Wheat and in the Cotton and Silk Imports Into Great Britain," by J. H. Poynting.

Empirical studies of industrial location factors have most commonly used the procedure of asking the decision-maker through a questionnaire or an interview to identity or rank those factors felt to be important in the choice of location. Such studies compare the relative importance of factors either between two or more spatially separate areas or between two or more industries located within the same area. Spatial comparisons may be made either at the inter-regional or at the intra-metropolitan scale. Ellis and Keeble, for example, in their studies of industrial location, identified such factors as availability of labor, labor costs access to markets and governmental incentives as being of major importance. The second approach is to present the findings as an inter-industry comparison. Studies making both inter-area and inter-industry comparisons, however, appear to assume that industrial location factors remain relatively unchanged over time. This paper presents evidence that this assumption may not always be justified.

Inventory investment is the most volatile component of aggregate demand. Its central role in business cycles has been extensively explored since the early 1950's[1] in the United States, yet for Britain only one macroeconomic study of inventory investment has been published.[2] The aim of this paper is to test some explanatory models of the inventory investment decision and to compare their forecasting performance with other forecasting instruments.
Section 2 develops theoretical models incorporating variables which represent various motivations for stockbuilding and constraints, including policy-determined constraints, on investors' behavior. It is hypothesized that the investment function differs between upswings and downswings due to cyclical variations in investors' behavior and in the impact of unplanned accumulation or depletion.
Section 3 estimates the equations from section 2, and section 4 uses some of the estimated equations to derive forecasts for the post-sample period 1967 II to 1968 IV. Their forecasting performance is compared with that of forecasts from a non-explanatory autoregressive scheme, the National Institute and the econometric equations of several U.S. studies.
Attention is limited to investment in stocks of finished goods by British manufacturers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a model where the company income tax base is a function of levels of economic activity, it is shown that there is no basis for the widely held view that the built-in effect of the British company tax system has been destabilising. The model, synthesized from separate models of gross profit and depreciation, was estimated for eight industry groups using annual data for the period 1950-66. A comparison of the lags in the model with the length of business cycles between 1950--66 showed that the automatic effect of the tax is likely to have been stabilizing.
This paper examines in detail the cyclical behavior of the company income tax base under the old system of income and profits taxation, and then assesses the automatic stabilizing qualities of the system. No evidence is found to support the view that the built-in effect of the tax on the level of economic activity was destabilising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the significance of industrial trends survey carried out by the Confederation of British Industries to business enterprises in Great Britain. It analyzes the economic seasonality, influence of employment to business optimism and relation between optimism and industrial productivity. The data used throughout this survey are the balances of the proportions of respondents answering up, less the proportions answering down, to the various industrial trends survey questions. These balances have been widely used and do seem to be the most useful statistics for analysis. This hypothesis was tested, but the results suggest that there is little evidence for accepting it. Many of the questions asked but not suitable for statistical verification. Finally, it was considered and some suggestions are made as to because some readers may not be familiar with the statistical techniques used in this paper, the main conclusions of the analysis are repeated here. Firstly, the evidence suggests that businessmen's replies to the industrial trends survey are free of seasonality, with the possible exception of some of the expectations data. Further, there is no evidence that, when the survey is taken as a whole, adjustment is done by considering changes from the corresponding period in the previous year. Secondly, there is no significant evidence that the expectations data are of use in forecasting the corresponding official statistics or the reported figures in the succeeding survey. Finally, the popularity of the optimism question was investigated, and it was found that this was not useful as a business cycle predictor.

This article discusses the paper "Entrepreneurial Efficiency in the British Coal Industry Between the Wars," by N.K. Buxton, published in the previous issue of the journal "Economic History Review." The purpose is to show that whilst Buxton has correctly identified what has come to be regarded as "the greatest shortcoming" of British colliery owners, he has, at the same time, demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the issues involved in reorganization. By his failure to define his terms rigorously Buxton has confused the issues that were at stake. Instead he embarked upon an analysis of the relationship between size and efficiency of mines. He begins by comparing the findings of the Royal Commission on the size of colliery undertakings with information derived from the Ministry of Fuel and Power Statistical Digest from 1938 relating to the size of mines. Colliery owners were not criticized for the small size of their mines, but for their failure to create large undertakings by means of colliery amalgamations. Although amalgamation of undertakings provided the basis for the interwar rationalization program, an important, but subsidiary, part of this program was the elimination of surplus capacity. The essential point to note here is that it was never suggested that surplus capacity should be eliminated solely by the closure of small mines.

The article deals with the Anglo-American business cycle and the dynamics of its economic system from 1820 to 1860. The dynamics of the Anglo-American economic system resulted in large part from the mechanics of price formation in Great Britain and the United States. The aggregate price level in the United States was determined by the price-specie-flow mechanism, operating in more or less textbook fashion, except that the specie in question was largely silver for the 1830's and gold for the 1850's. The aggregate price level in England, however, was the result of more complex forces. The underlying forces were the same as those working in the price-specie-flow mechanism, but they did not always work through changes in the British supply of bullion, as that mechanism implies. Output in Great Britain grew more rapidly than its trend in the 1830's because of an expansion in domestic investment. As R.C.O. Matthews, the author of the classic monograph on this cycle, said that the mainstay of the British cycle was domestic investment.

The article examines the history and state of retail organizations in Great Britain. It compares and contrasts the adolescent retail representation movement with the older and mature manufacturing industry representation movement, particularly the Confederation of British Industry. The cyclic rise and decline of the Retail Consortium, founded in 1967, and the evidence for the hypothesis that increased government intervention in particular sectors of the economy gave rise to business interest groups, are explained.

The article examines the issue of wage bargaining under conciliation agreements in Great Britain from 1860 to 1914. The development of the conciliation movement after 1860, which involved the adoption of arbitration, sliding scales, and conciliation boards, has been commented on frequently by labour historians. However, it has been approached either in terms of generalized assertions based on little evidence or on the basis of the detailed study of a particular board. Although the detailed studies are valuable they permit only limited conclusions. This field has consequently lacked an intensive study of the evidence appertaining to the movement as a whole and seen against the background of the late Victorian economy. Particularly, there is a need for an analysis of the general effects of the boards' operations, the movement of wage rates over the trade cycle,and the falling price trend of the Great Depression and subsequent upturn of prices. In addition, an assessment must be made of the impact of conciliation upon the labour movement, upon militancy and bargaining power, and reasons advanced for the boards' formation and their later decline in popularity.

This article presents information on various periodical articles on the English economic history that were published in 1968. The medieval English economy seems to have taken less space than usual in the journals in 1968. Two articles on the history of settlement, reportedly, appeared in the journal "Agricultural History Review." One of those is E.A. Pocock's "The First Fields in an Oxfordshire Parish," which investigates the fields of Clanfield with the keen eye of a practising farmer plus an enthusiastic use of archaeological and documentary evidence. This is an interesting attempt to put the settlement pattern of a single parish under the microscope to get a chronology of cultivation and use. The other article is B.K. Roberts's "Study of Medieval Colonization in the Forest of Arden, Warwickshire," which is a collection of deeds and related documents. Historical demographers and others in recent years have begun to dispel a little of the thick mist obscuring the demography of early modern England and the relationships between population and other economic variables. Of special interest is a report by economist E.A. Wrigley on Colyton, "Mortality in Pre-Industrial England: The Example of Colyton, Devon, Over Three Centuries," which presents the methods and results of a family reconstitution study of mortality, both infant and adult.

The article describes the spread of the gas industry in Great Britain during the first half of the 19th century. It deals in particular with three problems: first, the extent to which the gas industry had developed by mid-century; second, the pace of construction of new gasworks in the period, and third, the amount of fixed capital investment in the gas industry. Finally, a few general remarks are made on the method of financing gas undertakings. The principal conclusions reached are that by about the middle of the nineteenth century the gas industry was widespread and the vast majority of towns with a population greater than 2,500 possessed gas companies; that the construction of new gasworks took place in phases corresponding to the trade cycle; and that throughout the period there was a marked tendency for gas manufacture to spread to progressively smaller towns. It is estimated that fixed capital investment in gasworks, at historic cost, was approaching, 12 pound million by the late 1840's.

This article focuses on the literary work of James Steuart related to the subject of public debt. The stupendous rise of the public debt during the present war has aroused concern among both economists and laymen over the ability of the nation to cope with its postwar economic problems in the face of what seems to be an unprecedented burden. This problem, however, is by no means unparalleled in history. During the eighteenth century Great Britain was involved in five wars, spaced over almost half of the century. During that period the public debt grew by leaps and bounds. It was 16.4 million pounds in 1701, 78.3 million in 1748, and 252.5 million in 1793. The impact of this continuous growth of the public debt on the economy of that period was in several respects more striking than that of the much larger increases of our time. In many ways, indeed, it supplies the key to the economic history of Britain and her rapid rise to commercial and industrial supremacy over the Continental nations. It contributed to economic development and exercised a stabilizing influence on British capitalism. Only James Steuart saw the social and economic implications of the growing public debt.