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The article reconstructs the opinions expressed by academic economists in front of the Radcliffe Committee, whose Report was a document of considerable importance for the post-war theory of monetary policy. The Committee provided one of the first official occasions to discuss the nexus between inflation and unemployment in Britain and the role of monetary policy in achieving price stability. Analyzing the Report, the Memoranda and the Minutes of evidence put forth in front of the Committee, the article documents the innovative aspects of the Radcliffe doctrine on monetary issues and its complex connections with Keynesian and Post-Keynesian monetary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appointment of a Committee on the Working of the Monetary System in 1957 (Radcliffe Committee) in the UK gave the occasion to debate innovative ideas in the field of monetary policy. Many prominent economists participated in the Committee’s works, which ended with the publication of the Radcliffe Report in 1959. Making an exception to the rule of not mentioning individual contributions, the Radcliffe Report claims to ‘follow Professor Kahn … in insisting upon the structure of interest rates rather than some notion of the “supply of money” as the centrepiece of monetary action’. As we reconstruct in the paper, Kahn based his proposals on a conceptual framework, emphasising the link between inflation, wages and aggregate demand and the importance of combining incomes policy and term-structure control in view of achieving external equilibrium, full employment and price stability. One finding of our research is that Kahn’s recommendations regarding term-structure control—with their relevance to the present day—are best understood in connection with his theory of liquidity preference as presented in Kahn (1954). We also find that the Radcliffe Committee, while espousing Kahn’s policy recommendations, surrounded them with so many caveats as to render them de facto inoperative. As we suggest in our reconstruction, this depends partly on institutional considerations and partly on differences of opinion between Kahn and the Radcliffe Committee regarding monetary policy transmission and the causes of inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keynes's work on India before the First World War concentrated on analysis of the gold exchange standard and the stabilization of the rupee external value. Indian monetary arrangements were framed into a plan for foreign investment, implemented by the India Office in London. This policy, which was a typical example of public control over investments, occasioned Keynes's first job as an applied economist. Although neglected by Keynesian scholarship, this learning by doing experience is likely to have played a significant role in the young economist's training and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]