James Foreman-Peck - Böcker

Britain led the way for much of the world with industrial privatization during the 1980s. Yet the historical origins of the process that was being reversed have rarely been examined. This is a study of public and private ownership in industries such as railways, gas, water, electricity, and telecommunications. Industries such as these rely upon a substanial physical distribution network that `channels' their service from source to destination. They thus raise distinctive problems for government policy, as their requirement for some sort of unified system is incompatible with the coexistence of a number of competing service suppliers. Yet competition has been the traditional guarantee of `fair' and minimum prices in British industrial policy. This tension between experience and ideology provoked a variety of government policies over the last two centuries.Robert Millward and James Foreman-Peck provide a coherent and thorough economic history of the network industries, which continue to play an important role in the British economy. They trace the development of various institutional arrangements from the early nineteenth century until the end of the 1980s, and provide quantitative estimates of their performance. Their book offers a valuable historical approach to the contentious issue of privatization.

At the end of the 20th century with stagnating industrial output, unemployment in many European countries has climbed to levels not seen since the 1930s. Interventionist industrial policies thus find new popularity after the gentle flirtation with liberalization in the early 1990s. Under the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union was granted industrial policy powers for the first time. The present study aims to contribute to an understanding of European industrial policy by introducing an historical perspective. National policy continuities and the considerable time over which industrial performance responds to changed environments emerge with greater clarity in the long run. The chapters in this book take a broad view of industrial policy, including those policies that establish the `framework', such as competition law, as well as sector for firm specific policies. The overall conclusion is that improved framework policies, such as liberalization and re-regulation, are still essential. Monetary union in the `core' will increase tensions arising from economic inflexibility. Although there are often strong political barriers blocking implementation of appropriate industrial policies, they will be even more necessary under monetary union.

Through channels both open and concealed, the Victorian economy continues to influence us powerfully. Much economic thinking today gains support from perceptions of how the nineteenth-century British economy worked and how well it satisfied wants. Contemporary oligopolistic industrial structure is contrasted with Victorian self-regulating competition; the gross inequalities of Victorian laissez-faire are compared with support for the needy provided by the modern welfare state; and some regard Victorian values as vital principles of social organisation which should be regained. By examining the behaviour of the British economy between 1865 and 1914, the present work casts light upon some of these views. It does so in a variety of ways. New methods or evidence are deployed to establish accepted conclusions more firmly; unwarrantedly neglected aspects of the economy are analysed with present day concerns in mind; and traditional conclusions are reassessed. The book focuses upon three central themes: industrial organisation and technology, wages and living standards, and the monetary system. These are at the heart of discussions of productivity growth, the standard of living, well-being and poverty; the criteria by which the Victorian economic system should ultimately be judged.

Through channels both open and concealed, the Victorian economy continues to influence us powerfully. Much economic thinking today gains support from perceptions of how the nineteenth-century British economy worked and how well it satisfied wants. Contemporary oligopolistic industrial structure is contrasted with Victorian self-regulating competition; the gross inequalities of Victorian laissez-faire are compared with support for the needy provided by the modern welfare state; and some regard Victorian values as vital principles of social organisation which should be regained. By examining the behaviour of the British economy between 1865 and 1914, the present work casts light upon some of these views. It does so in a variety of ways. New methods or evidence are deployed to establish accepted conclusions more firmly; unwarrantedly neglected aspects of the economy are analysed with present day concerns in mind; and traditional conclusions are reassessed. The book focuses upon three central themes: industrial organisation and technology, wages and living standards, and the monetary system. These are at the heart of discussions of productivity growth, the standard of living, well-being and poverty; the criteria by which the Victorian economic system should ultimately be judged.

This volume offers an impressive collection of scholarly papers which investigate the historical foundations of globalization before 1945. The book explores the effects of the nineteenth century technologies of the railway, the telegraph and the steamship which promoted the globalization process by boosting trade across frontiers and triggering migration of labour and flows of capital to the temperate areas of agriculture. The colonial empires, in particular the British Empire, facilitated the process, as the integration of capital markets and monetary systems and methods of business organization followed trade and labour. The volume also covers the time between the wars, when impediments to trade, migration and currency movements increased and led to a period of deglobalization and divergence.