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The authors investigate how labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, firing regulations, and minimum wages have affected the evolution of wage inequality among male workers. Results of estimations using data on institutions in eleven OECD countries indicate that changes in labor market institutions can account for much of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 1998. Factors found to have been negatively associated with male wage inequality are union density, the strictness of employment protection law, unemployment benefit duration, unemployment benefit generosity, and the size of the minimum wage. Over the 26-year period, institutional changes were associated with a 23% reduction in male wage inequality in France, where minimum wages increased and employment protection became stricter, but with an increase of up to 11% in the United States and United Kingdom, where unions became less powerful and (in the United States) minimum wages fell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use tests for multiple structural breaks at unknown points in the sample, and band-pass filtering techniques, to investigate changes in U.K. economic performance since the end of World War II. Empirical evidence suggests that the most recent decade, associated with the introduction of an inflation targeting regime, has been significantly more stable than the previous post-WWII era. Both for real GDP growth, and for three measures of inflation, we identify break dates around the time of the introduction of inflation targeting, in October 1992. For all four series, the estimated innovation variance over the most recent sub-period is the lowest of the post-WWII era. The volatility of the band-pass filtered macroeconomic indicators we consider is, after 1992, almost always lower than either during the Bretton Woods regime, or over the 1971-92 period, often, like in the case of inflation and real GDP, markedly so. The Phillips correlation appears to have undergone significant changes over the last 50 years, from being unstable in the 1970s, to slowly stabilising from the beginning of the 1980s onwards. After 1992, the correlation exhibits, by far, the greatest extent of stability of the post-WWII era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volatile behavior of inflation, output, and interest rates in the United Kingdom prior to the 1990s helps discriminate between rival explanations for the outbreak of stagflation. We examine alternative hypotheses with a New Keynesian model of aggregate demand and inflation determination, estimated on quarterly UK data for 1959-2000. Our model features IS and Phillips curves based on optimizing behavior, and fully incorporates the distinction between detrended output and the output gap stressed by optimizing analysis. Using simulations of our model as well as information on the "real-time" views of policymakers, we test alternative explanations for the outbreak of inflation in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. We find that inaccurate estimates of the degree of excess demand in the economy contributed significantly to the outbreak. But we also find a major role for the failure at the time to recognize the importance of monetary policy, as opposed to nonmonetary devices, in controlling inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of liberal market economics and what became known as Thatcherism. It failed following the 2008 financial crash, and has begun to break apart with the vote to leave the EU. New political and cultural faultlines are confounding the orthodoxies of the governing class and cutting across the partisan loyalties of the main political parties. They herald the renewal of politics. But Labour is on the edge of an abyss. This article considers what the left can learn from Labour's previous periods of defeat and revisionism, and suggests where-if it survives-it should go next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the role of private equity (PE) in restructuring the UK corporate economy. It develops a theoretical synthesis to show that the evolution of the PE industry and firms in which it invested were governed by the relations of corporate governance between investor and investee companies. Effective governance relations were a necessary condition for success and complement firm specific resources to create competitive advantage. Four case studies are used to show the contrasting effects of these determining factors, Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (ICFC) and Slater Walker, and the two waves of buy-out centred restructuring that developed with the maturity of the PE industry after 1980. In contrast to the evolutionary approach, the periodisations utilised in this study show that structural breaks associated with points of institutional reform are also necessary to make firm specific resource and governance determinants of competitive advantage operable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the time-series properties of house price to earnings ratio (HPER) in the UK using aggregate and regional data. Specifically, we utilise a series of unit root tests to examine the null hypothesis of nonstationary HPERs. These include linear tests as well as a nonlinear test and also a test which accounts for abrupt structural change. The results are against the notion of stationary HPERs. This implies that house prices may permanently diverge from earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to investigate changes in the transmission mechanism of economic shocks in the UK. Our estimates demonstrate the importance of time variation and suggest that monetary policy shocks had a bigger impact on inflation, equity prices and the exchange rate during the inflation targeting period. Changes in the transmission of policy shocks to bond yields point to more efficient management of long-run inflation expectations. Finally, we investigate responses of disaggregated prices, with the median becoming more negative and cross-sectional patterns consistent with a decrease in the role of cost channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK real wage growth has slowed down, stagnated and recently turned sharply negative. We document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades, showing that recent patterns represent a distinct break of trend that pre-dates the onset of recession. We explore whether unemployment has become a stronger moderating influence on real wage growth and report, using aggregate economy-wide and regional panel data, that real wage-unemployment sensitivities have become stronger in the period from 2003 onwards. Finally, we offer some assessment of possible drivers of this increased sensitivity of real wages to unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meritocracy has become the creed of all three British political parties. There is a consensus that progress towards it has stalled. In fact, it is doubtful how widespread the advance to meritocracy ever was and how far short of achieving it Britain fell. In any case, meritocracy, if it is not accompanied by greater equality of outcome, would not promote a happier society. It would make the rich more unrestrained in their greed and the poor more miserable thinking their poverty their own fault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keith Dowding argues that business is systematically lucky in a capitalist society because it often gets what it wants without trying due to the way society is structured. But what ought to count here is not only how society is structured but why it is structured in certain ways and this means grappling with the dynamics of the structure-agency dialectic. Dowding overestimates the degree to which business is systematically lucky and underestimates the degree to which it is powerful because he fails to recognise the way in which business can shape the structures whose existence allows it to get what it wants without trying. We examine the position of two very different groups: British farmers and US bankers. British farmers were systematically lucky in the post-war years in the sense that they benefited from events outside their control. The US banking sector was lucky in 2008 because it was 'too big to fail'. But the banks had previously used their power to shape this outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apprenticeship has always played both a social and economic role. Today, it forms part of the regeneration strategies of cities in the United Kingdom. This involves the creation and management of complex institutional relationships across the public and private domains of the civic landscape. This paper argues that it is through closely observed analysis of these meso-level developments (in contrast to studies of national systems) that we can reveal how the sustainability of vocational education and training initiatives depends on the generation of civic social capital in the pursuit of collective goals. At the same time, the path-dependent nature of the clustering of social and economic inequality in urban post-industrial settings remains a constant reminder of the scale of the problems confronting all those involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the expansion of post-school education and incentives to participate in lifelong learning, institutions and labour markets continue to interlock in shaping life chances according to starting social position, family and private resources. The dominant view that the economic and social returns to public investment in adult learning are too low to warrant large-scale public funding has been challenged by recent LLAKES research that shows significant returns to participants in lifelong learning with improvements in both their employability and employment prospects. It is argued that, under conditions of growing social polarisation and economic uncertainty, lifelong learning can have a significant protective effect by keeping adults close to a changing labour market. In this paper we review research from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions, providing evidence of the beneficial effects of lifelong learning, especially when taking into account the dynamics of the life course. Transitions and turning-points in youth and in adult life are markers of diversification of the life course; how far these diversifications amount to ‘de-standardisation’ of the life course is debated. They involve biographical negotiation, in which any decision is consequential upon previous decisions and involves the exercise of contextualised preferences as well as the calculations of ‘rational choice’. Gaining a better understanding of how changing demands are negotiated at different life stages offers a new perspective, moving from narrow versions of rational choice theory towards models of biographical negotiation as promising avenues for effective policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michal Kalecki es un economista polaco cuya contribución a la macroeconomía ha tenido una gran influencia en los economistas de inspiración keynesiana. Tras terminar sus estudios de ingeniería civil en las escuelas politécnicas de Varsovia y Gdansk, comenzó su carrera en el Instituto de Investigación de los Ciclos Empresariales de Varsovia, del cual pasó al Instituto de Estadística de Oxford. Después de trabajar durante un año en la OIT (1945), se incorporó a las Naciones Unidas en Nueva York en donde se encargó de los informes económicos mundiales. Prosiguió su vida profesional en dos entidades de su país: la Academia Polaca de Ciencias y la Escuela Central de Planificación y Estadística. Los trabajos de Kalecki versan sobre la demanda agregada y las teorías de los beneficios, del ciclo económico y de la competencia imperfecta. Su contribución ha tenido una profunda influencia en los economistas keynesianos de Cambridge, así como en la economía postkeynesiana. Suele plantearse incluso la posibilidad de que Kalecki se haya anticipado a la teoría general del Keynes. En el artículo que reproducimos a continuación Michal Kalecki examina la política económica encaminada a mantener el pleno empleo. Su análisis se funda en una presentación contable muy sencilla de los ingresos públicos y en el concepto de producto nacional neto. Utiliza estos instrumentos teóricos para dilucidar cuál sería la política presupuestaria óptima en el Reino Unido y en los Estados Unidos a efectos de lograr el pleno empleo después de la guerra. Kalecki, que ya disfrutaba en 1945 de una fama reconocida gracias a su labor sobre los ciclos económicos, hizo posteriormente una contribución importante a la teoría del crecimiento y el funcionamiento de las economías capitalista y socialista. Analizó asimismo los aspectos políticos y económicos del logro y mantenimiento del pleno empleo en otros escritos de ese período. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in inequality across many rich nations, but especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, was meant to lead to a bigger economic pie from which all would benefit. In fact, the increased concentration of income over the last three decades has led to more fragile and unstable economies making it a key cause of the 2008 Crash and today's lack of recovery. The evidence of the last 100 years is that models of capitalism that fail to share the proceeds of growth more evenly will eventually self-destruct. More equal societies have softer business cycles. In contrast, more unequal economies are associated with more extreme cycles-they have exaggerated booms, deeper falls and extended troughs. The scale of inequality is not just an issue about fairness and proportionality, it is therefore integral to economic health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mid-twentieth century saw the creation of layers of managerial jobs in Britain. The increasing numbers of managers and a persistent degree of social closure at the top of organisational hierarchies led groups of managers to try to define specialist management functions as justification for holding organisational power. The Office Management Association was one such group. It promoted office managers’ expertise in the efficient running of the administrative side ofenterprises as a specialist managerial function worthy of a high place in managerial hierarchies. But specialisation was also fragmentation that would weaken the entire occupational group of all managers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A main activity of the state is to redistribute resources. Standard political economy models predict that a rise in inequality will lead to more redistribution. This paper shows that, for the UK in the period 1983-2004, a plausibly exogenous rise in income inequality has not been associated with increased redistribution. We explore this example of the 'paradox of redistribution' using attitudinal data. We show that standard political economy models of the individual demand for redistribution do have explanatory power, but that other attitudes and beliefs are also very important. Moreover, these attitudes and beliefs change quite quickly so are very important in explaining variation in the demand for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the 1990s, growth in privately rented housing in England and Wales began to reverse a prolonged period of decline. In high-cost housing areas the sector is increasingly acting as a stop-gap for those seeking to enter owner-occupation, while in less economically buoyant areas it is accommodating households who would previously have been more likely to live in social housing. This paper reveals that some of the strongest proportional growth in the sector has been in less prosperous areas where it has traditionally been under-represented and that the sector is housing an increasing proportion of economically inactive tenants. However, in key cities, particularly London, the sector’s growth has been influenced by increasing numbers of mobile workers and students. More recently, growth has been influenced by ‘buy-to-let’ mortgages, borrowing constraints and homeowners unable to sell. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of economic change on the lives of Great Britain's youth throughout the late-20th and early-21st centuries and the government educational policies geared towards them. The author first examines the downfall of Britain's youth labor market during the 1980s under the reign of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and notes the inadequacies of the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) formulated in response. Government policies aimed at eradicating social exclusion are then examined. In conclusion, the author argues for the importance of longitudinal studies in determining the effects of economic change on youths' life chances and future employment.

Abstract Over the three decades leading up to the crisis of 2008, inequality dramatically increased in the United States and Great Britain. What stands out, but is seldom noted, is that this occurred within democracies where the relative losers-the overwhelming majority-could in principle have used the political system to block or reverse rising inequality. Why did they not do so? A glance at history reveals that peoples have only very infrequently contested inequality because they were led to believe that their inferior status in terms of income, wealth, and privilege was just, that it was not really so bad, or that it was necessary for their future well-being. Ideological systems legitimated a status quo of inequality, or in more modern times even increasing inequality. This article surveys the manner in which inequality has been historically legitimated, first predominantly by religion, then predominately by economic thought. Attention is then focused on the manner in which contemporary economic science and its popular interpretations in the media have served to legitimate inequality in the U.S. since the mid-1970s. The article concludes with a reflection on the unique conditions that enable the legitimation of inequality to be delegitimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1970s, the relation between Labor Party and trade union can be divided into early and late in two stages. Early in the opposition of Labor Party, their relation gradually improved. and was in a relative harmony; late in the ruling of Labor Party, the relation was in gradual deterioration and sharp contradiction. This feature of their relationship concerned not only different pursuits in different positions of Labor Party, but also trade union policy of Conservative Party and British economic conditions. From the interaction of Labor Party and trade union, trade union had a greater impact on Labor Party and trade union was an important variable affecting political ups and downs of Labor Party in 1970. From the respective influence of the relation on both Labor Party and trade union, through the 1970. Inborn Party and trade union were mutually wounded in the cycle of a relationship with reversal and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before privatisation, required rates of return and test discount rates were being applied to utility and other nationalised industries. One effect of this new approach was to promote more marginal-cost based tariffs which could fall particularly heavily on low-income groups. This trend was reinforced by privatisation which, when accompanied by market liberalisation, increased uncertainty about the likely returns on capital investment projects. Both of these issues, the treatment of poverty and coping with uncertainty, were of long-standing concern to the Austrian school of economics. Where Austrian economists differed from liberalising governments was in their locating of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the impact of the pivotal British Labour victory of 1945 within the larger continuum of reform over market and property relations in the postwar transatlantic political economy of the United States and Great Britain. Despite the seeming divergence of the American and British political economies after 1945 - one under the rubric of the regulatory reforms of the liberal Democratic party (1933-53), the other under the nationalizing reforms of the socialist Labour party (1945-51), respectively - the two nations, I argue, progressed in the long term along complementary stages of development conditioned by their own historical circumstances. These included not only the impact of the Depression and World War II on each society, but also the distinctive legacy and timing of British and American social reforms throughout the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the conceptualisation of the consumer by British social democratic writers in the 'golden age' of post-war capitalism. It examines in particular their discussion of the neo-classical concepts of rationality and sovereignty and highlights the diversity and complexity of their positions in relation to these. It illustrates how these carried within them a particular view of individuals: their capacity for rational choice, their autonomy and their motivations, which informed in important and profound ways how different writers, and different groups of writers, viewed the nature and means of realising the social democratic project in an age of affluence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-assesses the resignation of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two junior ministers in January 1958 in terms of the importance of this event in the pre-history of Thatcherism. It does so by considering Thorneycroft's political career as a whole, arguing that, throughout his time in public life, he showed characteristics that were more in tune with the New Right Conservatism of the 1980s than with the One Nation Toryism that held sway for a generation after 1945. In particular, Thorneycroft singled out inflation as the key concern of the British economy and took up, without the need for guidance from his junior ministers, the need, if inflation was to be checked, for government to control its spending and the quantity of money in circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the nineteen-forties Britain entered the age of intensive national economic management. This required the government to 'manage the people' alongside the deployment of new policy instruments, requiring in turn a representation of economic arguments aimed at persuading a mass electorate. The result was a ubiquitous representation of economic issues in moral terms - a re-invention of ideas about the 'moral economy' which many historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have seen as crucial to arguments about economic life in those years. This article analyses the origins, deployment and consequences of the use of such arguments in this new context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictions from dominant strands of the management strategy and business history literature suggest that the adoption of the multi-divisional form is associated with corporate success. There is theoretical support for this contention and, in certain non-British contexts and historical periods, also some confirmatory evidence. To examine the relationship in the British case, this article examines the strategy and structure characteristics of successful firms between 1950 and 1984. To do so it utilises an extensive accounting database to compute the return on capital employed for all quoted companies in the period. Using this measure, and applying it to a sub-sample of long-run surviving companies, it produces a ranking of firms according to profitability. A sample of best performing firms is matched to a paired sample of firms selected from the bottom of the financial performance ranking, and their organisation structures are contrasted. Examples are used to illustrate cases where strategies have been well supported by the structures adopted and have successful financial performance outcomes. A tendency for firms to adopt holding company structures in preference to the multi-divisional form is identified, particularly before 1970. Transitions from the functional to the holding company form tend to be successful in general and appear more successful than transitions to the multi-divisional form, again in the earlier decades in particular. These findings cast doubt on the universal applicability of the Chandler-Williamson model of the large, professionally managed, multi-divisional enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need for Great Britain to return to labourism as the best hope for social justice. The author examines the major changes in the historical framework of Labourism including the cultural and economic shifts in society, and the devalued link with trade unions within the Labour Party. Advocates cite that labourism will progress with an alternative vision where society becomes the master of the economy, and in building a social democratic coalition that recognizes the economic and social interests of the middle class.

The article discusses strategies to address the social problems of Great Britain in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The author contends that the British crises can be called the problem of broken society and social recession. Remedies are offered to resolve the social crisis including the return of power to the people, civic responsibility, and investing time, energy, and money to rebuild and protect the public realm against the self-interests of the wealthy few.

The article discusses the post-World War II economic history of Great Britain, focusing on how the government publicly portrayed the issue of balance of payments during the period of the 1950s and 1960s. The author considers whether the period was actually a time of economic decline; the methods used to factor macroeconomic statistics; and diplomatic and economic relations between the U.S. and Great Britain as a result of wartime lend-lease policies and the Marshall Plan. The author considers government advertising encouraging the British to increase production and limit imports as a way of addressing problems deemed inherent in the country's trade imbalance between exports and imports.

The article reviews the article "An Overhaul of Doctrine: The Underpinning of UK Inflation Targeting," by Edward Nelson, published in the same issue of the journal.

The inflation targeting regime prevailing in the UK is not the result of a change in policy maker objectives. Analysis of UK policymakers¿ statements demonstrates that objectives have been essentially unchanged over five decades. Instead, the crucial underpinning of UK inflation targeting is an overhaul of doctrine. This overhaul involves changes in policymakers¿ views regarding key IS and Phillips curve parameters. They particularly have involved whether levels terms (of the real interest rate and the output gap) appear in the curves. Contrary to conventional wisdom, changing views on the expected-inflation term in the Phillips curve do not play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of the nature of internal diversity within liberal and collaborative market economies. Based on large scale comparative survey data, we assess the extent to which specific clusters of practices are associated with specific varieties of capitalism. Given that recent literature has pointed to internal diversity within specific national contexts, we explore the nature of internal diversity within both liberal and collaborative market economies, and what makes each variety of capitalism distinct. We find that more than one cluster of practices is indeed likely to be encountered in a particular national context, but that this diversity was bounded: only a limited number of alternative paradigms are likely to emerge and persist. The survey findings not only shed light on the nature of this internal diversity, but also reveal the fact that liberal and collaborative markets remain distinct, with the rights accruing to employees being more deeply embedded in a wide cross section of firms within the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the changes to UK monetary policy since the early 1980s, we study the existence and nature of changes in the properties of retail price inflation over this period. A feature of our analysis is the attention paid to the marked seasonal pattern of monthly UK inflation. After taking account of seasonality, both univariate and Phillips curve models provide strong evidence of changes in the level and persistence of inflation around the end of 1992, at the time of the introduction of inflation targeting. Indeed, all models point to the effective disappearance of inflation persistence after this date, implying that constant-parameter models estimated using both pre- and post-inflation targeting data periods should be treated with considerable caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview on the vital role of the financial services sector in the British economy for the past twenty years. The sector has done interrelated functions like acting as a medium between borrower and lenders and providing insurance to businesses. For the past twenty years, the growth rate of the sector has increased at 4.7% per annum, while the economy as a whole has increased at 2.6% per annum. The contribution of the financial sector to the country's economy grew by 5.8% while the average gross real domestic income grew by 2.7% and the national income by 2.3%.

There is considerable debate among historians and sociologists over the periodisation of the social dynamics of mass consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. During the immediate period following post-war austerity, journalists and other commentators focused on greater affluence and the relative reduction in spending on 'necessary' items. Sociologists, however, often emphasised the continued role of class in shaping consumer preferences. In this paper, I use evidence from the Family Expenditure Survey, conducted by the UK government since the 1950s, to capture relative differences in the weekly spending patterns of all households. I compare expenditure data for the year 1961 for detailed categories of consumer goods and services, with respect to differences in income, class and age, and compare these data with the results for 1971, 1981 and 2004. Using a multi-dimensional approach more conventionally used in lifestyle research and brand marketing allows us to examine how consumption is structured by inequality, though in subtly changing ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large majority of the labour force were manual workers in 1960. As voters, they had electoral power to pursue collective goods. As producers they were able to disrupt production. The majority left school with no qualifications. Their human capital consisted of skills specific to particular production processes. These became obsolete with de-industrialization, and with the large rise in secondary and higher education. Educated workers relied more on individual bargaining power, and less on collective goods. Casting workers as consumers rather than citizens or producers punished those with low purchasing power, de-legitimized producer collective action and justified low wages. Poverty increased and relative wages fell. Rising productivity was partly offset by rising house prices and longer household working hours. Council house sales enfranchised a minority and penalized the rest. The majority continued to identify as working class, but their culture was discredited by market liberalism and consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preservation of the apprenticeship system in the Australian construction industry contrasts with its decline in Britain over the last three decades. This decline is conventionally ascribed to changes in industrial structure, specifically a decline in the role of the public sector, intensification of subcontracting and growth of self-employment. Given that the Australian construction industry has undergone similar structural changes to those in the United Kingdom, this difference in outcome requires explanation. This article suggests that the contrasting outcomes are the result of institutional differences in the organization of the training system, employers and labour between the two countries. These institutional differences are, however, diminishing as arrangements for training and industrial relations in Australia are increasingly fashioned in the likeness of the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]