Public Policy and the Economy since 1900

This comprehensive new study gives a full account of the formulation of British economic policy in the twentieth century, drawing on the most recent research based on documents made available under the thirty-year rule to give detailed insight into policy-making in the 1950s and bringing thenarrative right up to the end of the 1980s. The book offers both a lucid narrative description of the evolution of policy from the turn of the century through the First World War, recovery, the Depression, the Second War and its aftermath, the 'Keynesian Revolution', and the shifts and about-turns of more recent decades, and a coherentanalysis of these processes. Covering both macro and micro issues, the text is structured in such a way as to give due weight to all the various influences at work: institutional aspects, such as the changing role of policy-making ministries, as well as political debate and economic theory.