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This article charts the successes and failures of urban regeneration policies in the UK. Aspects of both continuity and change in the direction and implementation of urban policy are explored. It is argued that while New Labour's approach since 1997 has been distinctive and, in some respects, innovative, especially in relation to community engagement, it has continued to adopt a flawed conceptualisation of the urban problem which has led to a limited policy response. That legacy is likely to have a continuing influence on policy. Looking ahead, new challenges need to be faced, notably economic recession and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Our study bridges the gap between in previous research on the synchronization between financial and business cycles over a long period. Using the data for the UK from 1270 to 2016 we analyze the synchronization between financial and business cycles using spectral Granger causality (Breitung & Candelon, 2006). Our paper brings several important findings to the discussion on the financial and business cycle link. Our paper is the first one (to the best of our knowledge) that use data over a long period spanning several centuries. We use spectral analysis and advanced spectral analysis (SSA) and (MSSA) to study the relationship between financial and business cycles in the long run. Paper results show financial and business cycles series moves along over the medium-term spectrum. We find a strong link between the cyclical component in the output (real GDP series) and the cyclical component in the financial series (housing price, credit). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Science: Future of Lithuania / Mokslas: Lietuvos Ateitis is the property of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Do new products launched during a recession perform better? Does the severity of the recession matter? Are products more successful when launched earlier or later in a recession? These are all questions of managerial importance that as yet remain unanswered in the extant marketing literature. The authors analyze two datasets: 1) 8,981 product launches in 20 United Kingdom fast-moving consumer goods categories over 18 years and 2) 1,071 product launches in the United States automotive market over 63 years. The results reveal products launched (a) during a recession and (b) later rather than earlier in the recession survive longer, while more severe recessions are associated with shorter survival. The same findings emerge for the dependent variables of sales and market share. This paper thus enriches marketing theory on recessions by conceptualizing and quantifying timing effects on new product launch success. For managers, the results demonstrate the benefits of countercyclical launching of new products during recessions and of marketing proactively in such economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a new chronology of the business cycle in the United Kingdom from 1700 on an annual basis and from 1920 on a quarterly basis to 2010. The new chronology points to several observations about the business cycle. First, the cycle has significantly increased in duration and amplitude over time. Second, contractions have become less frequent but are as persistent and costly as at other times in history. Third, the typical recession has been tick‐shaped with a short contraction and longer recovery. Finally, the major causes of downturns have been sectoral shocks, financial crises, and wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the variation in nonperforming loans over the economic cycle and the effect of past returns based on a nonparametric quantile analysis of the largest Islamic banks in the United Kingdom and Turkey from 2010 to 2019. The findings show a weak variation in nonperforming loans that increases with an increasing return on assets and a decreasing return on equity and decreases in an inverse scenario. As a result, the credit risk of Islamic banks is countercyclical. We suggest that the inverse relationships evidence the existence of trade-offs within bank returns and credit risk. Thus, banks' past profitability and risk mitigation are determinants of asset quality. These findings provide support for risk-taking and risk-sharing principles in which flight-to-safety mirrors the calibration of risk factors in a disruptive economy. Our estimates indicate that nonparametric quantile regression captures considerably more variation in a risk-return analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the statistical properties of contemporary business fluctuations in the United Kingdom. We study the period 1956-90 using quarterly, detrended data on key aggregate variables. We compute selected moments of the data, compare our results with those for the United States, and rigorously test for dynamic instabilities. Our findings confirm the existence of substantive cyclical regularities, both across countries and across time. Some notable cross-country differences are also identified. Conclusions about stability are shown to be potentially sensitive to the method of testing. In general, cross-correlations are appreciably more stable than standard deviations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study aims to bridge the gap between contemporary studies on financial cycles and the financial instability hypothesis in the form of a Minsky cycle (Minsky, 1963). Paper contribution range from explored causality links (financial cycles cause business cycles) to the empirical estimation of the Minsky moment. We use Braitung and Candelon (2006) Granger causality test and discrete threshold model (Hansen, 2005) to the link between financial and business cycles in the UK from 1270-2016. Financial and business cycles relation varies over time with contemporary financial cycles being longer to their historical versions. Financial cycles lead business cycles. Business cycles are an economy reaction to them and change in the Minsky moment. Minsky moment has a statistically significant impact on main growth determinants - population, export, technology. Policymakers should look for the Minsky moment when setting up a new economic policy to assure it will be an effective one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two main questions. First, it seeks to establish whether the stylized facts of the 'great moderation' that have been documented for the UK and US economies can be found for the Euro area. Second, it explores possible explanations for any changes that have occurred in the volatility of Euro area output fluctuations. In examining why business cycles have moderated, much of the existing literature has tended to concentrate on a few key factors. These include shifts in the structure of the economy, improved monetary policy and a 'good luck' factor. This paper, however, follows a relatively new branch of the great moderation literature by focusing on whether international business cycle linkages have changed in a way that may have perpetuated the dampening in Euro area output fluctuations. The results show Euro area output fluctuations to have significantly reduced in variability over the last quarter of a century. The results go on to highlight that, although Euro area cycles differ little from rest of the world cycles, the moderation in Euro area output fluctuations is only marginally due to changes in international business cycle linkages and smaller international and domestic shock variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International real business cycle (IRBC) models predict a real exchange rate volatility that is much lower than the levels observed in the data. In this paper, we build a two-country IRBC model with both a traded and a non-traded goods sector, and calibrate it to UK-euro area (EA) data. We provide evidence on the existence of a cointegrating relationship between UK and EA traded sector total factor productivity (TFP) by estimating a vector error correction model (VECM). To account for this relationship, we incorporate non-stationary technology shocks in the traded sectors in our model, and show that then the model is able to match the observed volatility of the UK–EA real exchange rate. Our analysis points out that both the presence of non-traded sectors and non-stationary technology shocks are necessary to account for the observed volatility in the real exchange rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current financial crisis has raised queries about the adequacy of the present regulatory regime. Whilst the immediate priority may be to plug the obvious holes in the system, there are some long-term generic problems with almost any system of financial regulation. This paper explores one such concern, i.e. the boundary problem. This arises because effective regulation, one that actually bites, is likely to penalise those within the regulated sector, relative to those just outside, causing substitution flows towards the unregulated. This boundary problem impacts on many proposals, such as 'narrow banking' and my own, with Avinash Persaud, for state and time-varying capital adequacy requirements. The question of how and where to set the boundary is considered. Such boundaries will always be criticised as leading to disintermediation, competitive inequality (no level-playing-field), inefficiency and higher spreads and borrowing rates; and such criticisms will be valid up to a point. The paper ends by discussing how best to respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates codependent cycles, i.e., transitory components that react to common stimuli in a similar, although not necessarily synchronous fashion. Unlike previous studies, the methodology of this paper allows FIML estimation of the restricted VAR/VECM and therefore the extraction of the unobserved codependent cyclical components via a Beveridge-Nelson decomposition. It is further shown that the number and order of cofeature combinations that yield the scalar component models associated with codependence is limited by the dimension of a finite-order VAR system. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that LR tests based on FIML estimates have higher power than alternative GMM and canonical correlations tests, while maintaining good size properties. An empirical application investigates the presence of codependence in UK consumption data. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to delve into the intricate the mechanism through which alterations in currency exchange rates give rise to shifts in inflation rates, while taking into careful consideration the country's economic cycle. In order to accomplish this objective, we used a dataset that spanned from 1 January 1999 to 1 July 2023, focusing our analytical lens on three specific geographic areas, namely the Eurozone, the United Kingdom, and Canada. In our pursuit of understanding this complex relationship, we employed the Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive model. Our research outcomes can be succinctly encapsulated as follows: in the initial stages, particularly during phases characterized by robust economic growth, the transmission of exchange rate effects onto inflation levels appeared to exhibit a partial impact across all geographic areas under examination. However, during periods marked by economic downturns, both the United Kingdom and Canada displayed a distinctly more comprehensive transmission of these effects. Moreover, the prevailing projections for the forthcoming time horizon, across all the countries encompassed by our study, strongly indicate the onset of an expansionary phase that is projected to extend over a span of 25 months. Lastly, concerning the implications of unexpected disturbances or shocks, it is noteworthy that the response of exchange rates to inflation induced shocks was neither immediate nor as pronounced as the corresponding reaction of inflation to sudden shifts in exchange rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The dating of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive. At this stage, there is no consensus on the existence of such a cycle, or of its periodicity and amplitude, or of the relationship of individual member countries to that cycle. Yet cyclical convergence is the key consideration for countries that wish to be members of the currency union. The confusion over whether and to what degree the UK is converging on the cycles of its European partners, or whether its cycle is more in line with the US, is one example of this lack of consensus. Moreover, countries will vary in the components and characteristics that make up their output cycles at any moment, as well as in the state of their cycle. In this paper we show how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework. This allows us to decompose movements in output, both at the European level and in member countries, into their component cycles and allows those component cycles (and the coherence between them) to vary in their importance and cyclical characteristics. That then allows us to determine if the inconclusive convergence results obtained so far have appeared because member countries have some cycles in common, but diverge at other frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Given the emergence of new legal initiatives for union recognition, declining levels of union membership and the growth of alternative forms of employee representation, this paper aims to examine the management of employee voice in non-union firms. Design/methodoIogy/approach - The research adopts a case study approach in seven non-union organisations from different sectors of economic activity in the UK. Several themes guided the design of the research instruments. Interviews were conducted with managerial respondents responsible for the design and implementation of employee voice at each case study, including non-personnel practitioners. Findings - Provides information on: the meaning of non-union voice; the range of practices adopted; the potential outcomes; and apparent bathers to the implementation of non-union voice arrangements. Research limitations/implications - The research collected data from managerial respondents only, and this limitation is noted. Further research in this area is suggested, particularly from employee stakeholders involved in the processes of employee involvement Originality/value - The paper addresses a gap on employee voice in non-union settings. It suggests that it is too simple to dismiss voice in non-union organisations as ineffective and inconsequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cook, Holly and Turner recently developed a hypothesis of a positive relationship between the durability of consumers' expenditure and the asymmetric behaviour it exhibits. Supportive evidence was found by applying Sichel's tests of business cycle asymmetry to the component series of UK consumers' expenditure, which represent goods of differing durability, in this paper the relationship is re-examined using the original data, by implementing Stock's diagnostic tests of time deformation. The results provide further support for the durability-asymmetry hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of economic crisis, many employers in liberal labor markets reduce their employees' working hours, which leads to an increase in the incidence of involuntary part-time work. We analyze the effectiveness of working time regulation in preventing such an increase during downswings. For this we look at the case of Germany, where hours adjustments are highly restricted by law. Using a state-level panel regression approach, we find that the incidence of involuntary part-time work is positively associated with the unemployment rate but that the association is much weaker than in the US and in the UK. Transition probabilities between employment states over the cycle suggest two particular underlying mechanisms: First, already employed workers are more likely to want a full-time position in economic downturns ("added hours effect"). Second, job seekers make concessions with regards to their desired hours when labor market conditions are bad ("reservation hours effect"). We are the first to document these margins of cyclical hours adjustments which are fundamentally different from those in less regulated labor markets, where the cyclicality of involuntary part-time work is predominantly driven by hours changes at the same employer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Abstract: In the period from 1880 to 1913, time-varying German and British stock market returns are related to business cycle variables such as the deviation of industrial production from trend. Common British and German business cycle dynamics Granger cause stock returns and explain more than 20% of time variation in one-year ahead stock market returns. The link between business cycle variables and stock returns is less pronounced in the modern era of financial globalization. A potential explanation for this finding is the fact that during the first globalization period stock indices were dominated by industrial companies and stock prices varied in line with dividends. In the modern era of globalization stock price dynamics predominantly reflect time-varying risk premia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the link between urban quality improvements and economic activity. A key question is whether improvements in the urban environment which might be achieved, for instance, through pedestrianisation, will affect business location choices - for example, are office or retail businesses particularly keen to locate in more pleasant urban places? The paper outlines the current state of development of the literature with respect to the influence of urban quality on economic activity, and proposes a framework for forecasting economic impacts based on three communities of reference: customers, employees, and the businesses themselves. The results from original modelling of a case study area in Manchester, England are reported and suggest that the positive uplifts that may be expected from environmental improvement programmes may well be on a scale which is significant. The research is obviously important for the urban regeneration and renaissance agendas which posit attractive and well-designed environments as a way to create the right conditions for promoting economic growth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper models the phases of the UK business cycle using GDP data with a time-varying transition probabilities (TVTP) Markov-switching regime model and exogenous leading indicator variables. Single indicators in linear models are compared with the TVTP framework, with logistic and exponential functions used in the latter. The Markov-switching models capture the major recessions of the sample, but the use of leading indicators through the TVTP framework can improve this regime recognition. Finally, a forecast comparison shows that the TVTP models perform relatively well in predicting during the 1990s, particularly when nominal interest rates are used to generate the regime-switching probabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the causal effects of monetary policy on the British economy during the classical gold standard. Based on the narrative identification approach, I find that following a one percentage point monetary tightening, unemployment rose by 0.9 percentage points, while inflation fell by 3.1 percentage points. In addition, monetary policy shocks accounted for a third of macroeconomic volatility. [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]

Presents the author's comments on the paper "Total Factor Productivity Growth and the Revision of Post-1870 British Economic History," by Stephen Nicholas, published in the 1982 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." Application of total factor productivity (TFP) calculations in analyzing British economic growth; Limitations of the standard geometric index of TFP analysis; Source of the measurement of technical progress in the class of geometric indices; Problems with Nicholas stylized calculations of the effects of introducing market imperfections.

Presents the author's reply to the comments on his paper "Total Factor Productivity Growth and the Revision of Post-1870 British Economic History," published in the 1982 issue of the journal "Economic History Review." Criticism of the use of total factor productivity (TFP) indexes in measuring productivity growth in Great Britain in 1870; Assumptions used in constructing the TFP index; Analysis of the incorporation of non-constant returns and market imperfections in the productivity index.

The paper presents an econometric model of trade union membership in the United Kingdom from 1896 to 1984, with the particular object of forecasting the decline of over 2 million in membership since 1979. The empirical model utilizes cyclical variables in the explanation of membership changes, and separates the short- and long-run dynamics explicitly. It proves to be a superior specification to previous 'business cycle' models estimated for the UK and predicts satisfactorily the recent decline in membership. The inclusion of a dummy variable reflecting the political complexion of the government is the only secular variable that significantly improves equation performance, but the composition of changes in employment plays no part in explaining the recent decline in membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies exist of British firms involved in the African trade in the 19th century. Richard & William King of Bristol was one of the largest such firms and study of its growth during the nineteenth century throws new light on the development of Britain's African trade and on the business structures that evolved within it. In particular, it shows how firms coped with the depression that hit the African trade so severely in the 1880s. Kings -- despite not being based in Liverpool, the heart of the British side of the trade -- was one of the few of the long-established firms to survive the 1880s depression. This paper shows why this was the case and why, having survived the depression, it was taken over by William Lever in 1918. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment varies substantially over time and across sub-groups of the labour market. Worker flows among labour-market states act as key determinants of this variation. We examine how the structure of unemployment across groups and its cyclical movements across time are shaped by changes in labour-market flows. Using novel estimates of flow transition rates for the UK over the last 35 years, we decompose unemployment variation into parts accounted for by changes in rates of job loss, job-finding, and flows via non-participation. Close to two-thirds of the volatility of unemployment in the UK over this period can be traced to rises in rates of job loss that accompany recessions. The share of this inflow contribution has been broadly the same in each of the past three recessions. Decreased job-finding rates account for around one-quarter of unemployment cyclicality and the remaining variation can be attributed to flows via non-participation. Digging deeper into the structure of unemployment by gender, age, and education, the flow approach is shown to provide a richer understanding of the unemployment experiences across population sub-groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative measures of the UK output gap are considered for 1984-2007. The real-time series is strongly affected by the rolling-time estimation of the trend, and produces a picture of the business cycle which is not consistent with contemporary perceptions of the large fluctuations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A new, 'nearly-real', measure developed here may be better for estimating historical reaction functions. In the context of the current recession, none of these mechanically derived measures of the output gap are useful. Policymakers should make careful estimates of the likely fall in potential output on the basis of other information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides main statistical techniques to measure business cycles in Great Britain. Sensitivity of business cycle inference to measurement; Commitment of the government to avoid deficit in current account over the cycle; Identification of the turning points of the cycle.

In economic theory the Phillips curve presents the relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation rate. The inflation and unemployment rate bring important information about the stages of the economic cycle. This article attempts to find an answer to the question of whether the development of the difference between the unemployment and inflation rate, the so-called signal gap, may be an indicator of changes in the economic cycle. Quarterly data on the Czech Republic, France, Great Britain and the Republic of Korea were used to verify this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the performance of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her first ten years in office as of 1989. Economic activity in Europe in the latter half of the 1980s; Economic activity in Great Britain during Thatcher's tenure; Response to a study about Thatcher's performance by Charles Bean and James Symons.

This paper examines cyclical patterns of innovative activity in the United Kingdom over the period 1948-83. Innovative activity turns out to have many of the properties of a random walk, but does show a tendency to cluster during booms. There is clear evidence of a long-term secular relation between the level of innovative activity and the level of economic activity, although this may have changed in the 1980s. Finally, the data provide no reason for thinking that these clusters of innovation cause cyclic variations in economic activity, but variations in economic activity do Granger cause changes in innovative activity. [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.

This article presents information about various articles related to the economic history of Great Britain since 1850. Economic history, one is often told, is losing its attraction to students. As it becomes more mathematical, a branch perhaps of applied economics, so it loses its adherents, while social history gains those who seek empathy with people in the past, and who disdain quantification as an abstraction from historical reality. In the article "Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain," published in the journal "Past and Present," W.D. Rubinstein shows that traditional generalizations about the rise of manufacturing wealth in the nineteenth century do not survive painstaking counting of probate valuations. These demonstrate that the holders of large wealth at death, other than landowners, had amassed their fortunes predominantly in commerce, finance, and transport, rather than in cotton, engineering, or steel. Rubinstein is clearly right to emphasize the importance of the tertiary sector as a wealth-creator. Even the apparent simplicity of landed wealth based on broad acres does not survive David Cannadine's "The Landowner As Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire," published in the journal "Agriculture History Review."

This article discusses the currency crisis in India and Great Britain from 1930 to 1932. The early 1930s were crucial years in the development of the imperial relationship between Great Britain and India. Many aspects of the relationship between Britain and India were altered by the great depression of the early 1930s and its political consequences. For example, as has only recently been pointed out, this period was one in which the attitude of British policymakers towards the problem of maintaining sales of British cotton goods in India underwent a fundamental change. The decision of the British government in September 1931 to take sterling off the gold standard and to impose a sterling standard on the rupee was momentous in itself. It is also important as illustrative of one important aspect of the imperial relationship. This article investigates the policies and actions of the British and Indian governments during the currency crisis of 1930-2 in an attempt to separate fact from fiction on these points. The Indian currency crisis of 1930-32 was a crisis of confidence in the rupee. Political uncertainty and economic depression stimulated a flight of capital from India and a decline in the market for her export staples.

This paper presents some empirical models of profitability, using panel data covering 709 large UK companies over the 1970s and 1980s focusing specifically on the role of aggregate demand shocks in shaping firm-level profitability. In basic regressions and in quite complex econometric models the results suggest that firm-level profit margins fell heavily during the deep manufacturing recession of the early 1980s and, as such, are consistent with models predicting the procyclical nature of profit margins. This result holds across different product groups (producer goods, consumer durables and non-durables), though the timing of the impact of aggregate shocks appears to differ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide international evidence on the joint behavior of consumption and the real rate of interest and examine the rational expectations restrictions of the permanent income hypothesis. We extend the basic model to allow for independent effects of the stage of the business cycle or a regime shift after 1979. In our eight-country sample (using I970s-1980s data) we find a small but internationally similar rate of intertemporal substitution once we allow for a regime shift affecting the average growth of consumption after 1979. The rational expectations restrictions are formally rejected, most prominently for the United Kingdom and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers have found that forecasters underestimate changes in gross national product and its components. One leading explanation of this under-forecasting is that the actual changes are more variable than the predicted changes. The present paper tests this hypothesis. The authors make use of two large data sets. The first set consists of a wide range of forecasts of the British economy made by the Great Britain. Department of Treasury, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the London Business School and The Sunday Telegraph. Some of the forecasts are annual, some half-yearly, some quarterly and some for the fourth quarter only. The second data set comprises the OECD's forecasts of economic activity in its seven major member countries Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Great Britain and the U.S.A. The forecasts are published biannually in the "Economic Outlook." All forecasts and outcomes are expressed as percentage changes on the level recorded for the appropriate previous period; this base level is either an estimated outcome in the case of one-step ahead forecasts, or another prediction when analyzing the accuracy of the second and subsequent links in a multiperiod chain for forecasts.

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.

This article contrasts the experiences of the United States and United Kingdom during and after the Great Recession to understand the role of financial shocks in the magnitude of the crises and length of the recoveries. It starts from the common consensus that the Great Recession first and foremost was a financial crisis. It shows that relative to the United States, the Great Recession in the United Kingdom was more closely associated with a decline in productivity. Motivated by the similar behavior of financial variables at a business cycle frequency, it contrasts the behavior of the U.S. and U.K. economies through the lens of a simple real business cycle model augmented with financial shocks. A credit channel that operates on firm hiring decisions captures the magnitude of the output decline in both the United States and United Kingdom but exaggerates the response of the hours margin for the United Kingdom. The conclusion is that the financial channel supported in the U.S. data seems less appropriate for understanding the U.K. experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that firm‐level investment is characterized by periods of low investment punctuated by 'spikes', but widely debated whether such lumpiness matters for aggregate investment. We provide new empirical evidence that variation in UK aggregate investment is driven by variation in the number of firms undertaking investment spikes; this pattern holds for all sectors and across the business cycle. We set out and estimate a tractable firm‐level model of the timing of investment spikes that incorporates the effect of specific macroeconomic factors and aggregates to match observed variation in aggregate investment. Using simulations, we establish that low demand growth was the dominant factor inhibiting UK firms' investment spikes immediately following the Great Recession, while heightened uncertainty prolonged low investment and prevented a 'v‐shaped' economic recovery. We use the Great Recession as a source of exogenous variation with which to study heterogeneity in response to aggregate shocks. We find that the minority of firms operating with persistently high‐debt levels—and therefore with balance sheets more exposed to the costs of financial distress—were significantly less likely to undertake an investment spike following the recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]