Macropolicy in the Rise and Fall of the Golden Age

The golden age was the era of demand management. Originally with monetary, and then fiscal policy, the governments of the advanced capitalist economies attempted to enhance and guide this accumulation process. The six countries which we consider in this chapter (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States) differed in their conduct of macroeconomic policy. In the three Continental countries and Japan, policy was aimed at maximizing the rate of accumulation. Monetary and discretionary fiscal policy was therefore systematically expansionary, notwithstanding the absence of an intellectual commitment to the Keynesianism in these countries. In the United States and the United Kingdom, policy was markedly less expansionary.