IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-24613-7_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Where Britain Went Wrong

In: Britain’s Economic Problem Revisited

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Bacon
  • Walter Eltis

Abstract

Those who seek to manage economies or advise on their management are either tinkerers or structuralists. Tinkerers believe that a country’s economic ills can be cured by adjusting demand, the exchange rate or the money supply, and by persuading workers to accept periods of wage restraint. Structuralists are concerned with the underlying structure of economies, and believe that tinkering about will not suffice where this is out of line. Treasury civil servants are generally tinkerers, and they usually seek to put things right by adjusting what they actually control. Many politicians are also tinkerers, and indeed in many economies minor adjustments to this and that are all that is needed to produce highly satisfactory results. In these economies — West Germany, Japan and recently France are examples — the underlying structure has been such in the past fifteen years that government control of effective demand, the money supply and the exchange rate were really all that was needed to produce an economic environment where businessmen and workers could co-operate to increase wealth and real incomes at very rapid rates.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Bacon & Walter Eltis, 1996. "Where Britain Went Wrong," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Britain’s Economic Problem Revisited, chapter 1, pages 1-34, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-24613-7_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-24613-7_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-24613-7_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.