Search

Much of the change in individual earnings has occurred at the top. This paper provides new evidence about the earnings distribution in the UK. The evidence is new in that it provides detail about what has happened within the top 10%, covering groups such as the top 1% and the top 0.5%. The aim is to set the recent rise in top earnings in historical perspective, and to make international comparisons. The evidence is new in that it covers the whole of the postwar period, allowing a contrast to be drawn with the 'golden age' of the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate appropriate methods of modelling the business cycle theory of trade union growth, and to develop and estimate a specification of the business cycle model. In so doing, the paper draws on the important pioneering work of Bain and Elsheikh (1976) for the United Kingdom. (The results of extension of the Bain and Elsheikh model to 1980 are shown in Appendix A.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long relative decline of Great Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate its causes. Recent contributions have stressed the deleterious effects of inappropriate and inconsistent government policies, in particular the deadweight of an inefficient public sector, and the contempt for industrial production on the part of a Treasury-dominated civil service elite obsessed with macroeconomic issues. They have also cited the anti-modernization ethos of the post-1945 political consensus. In a longer term perspective great stress has also been laid on the socio-cultural environment antipathetic to the industrial spirit, which, supposedly, had animated the business and investing classes in the pre-1850 phases of industrialization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of the new institutional approach as an explanation of Great Britain's relative economic decline in the twentieth century. The discussion will focus on economists B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick thesis as a reference point for assessing alternative formulations of institutional rigidities.