The paper surveys the evidence on British economic growth performance since the war. It is shown that the hypotheses proposed by Bacon and Eltis, Kaldor and Thirlwall to account for slow growth are inadequate and that supply side problems leading to poor productivity performance are the most...

The paper uses a general equilibrium model of regional labor markets, in which national and local factors interact to determine local wages and unemployment; when mobility between regions is obstructed by rent subsidies and controls, unemployment and wage differentials arise. Because...

In this paper I estimate and test a model of the effects of competitiveness, oil prices and government expenditure on output fluctuations in the United Kingdom. The model is based on the distinction between traded and non-traded goods, the latter being produced in both the private and public...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

This paper analyses the decline in unskilled employment in UK manufacturing.

Using the recent EC Commission report `One Market, One Money' as a point of reference, we consider the merits of a single currency in Europe. The main benefit is the reduction in transaction costs, which the report estimates at 0.4% of European Community (EC) GDP (but much less in countries with...

The paper addresses some of the effects of the removal of exchange controls in the UK in 1979. Nonparametric tests indicate that one consequence of the removal was a marked reduction in the volatility of the on-shore/off-shore differential. Co-integration tests suggest that abolition contributed...

This paper examines alternative methods which have been used to measure aggregate energy consumption over time. It is found that many of the measures which have been widely used in empirical studies are not appropriate for economic analysis. The concept of 'useful energy', popular in engineering...

The relationship between unemployment and the rate of change of money wages in interwar Britain is re-examined. It is argued that improved estimates of the wage equation can be obtained by taking account explicitly of factors which change the level of excess demand associated with the measured...

We extend the `rational-partisan' model of inflation to allow for the effects of unemployment persistence on the dynamics of inflation. We combine this model with the `exchange-rate-regime' model of inflation and examine the experience of the United Kingdom. Outside the fixed exchange rate...