ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the developments in European prices and incomes policy over the difficult decade of the 1970s. Prices policies aimed directly at restraining price behaviour have been adopted in all countries, with the exception of Germany. The chapter discusses consensus that the ultimate development of the trade-off approach being a more comprehensive consensus, and pointed to the Austrian and Norwegian experiences. It explores that the development of white-collar unionism has been rapid in recent years as a response to the economic pressures generated by inflation. Persuasion goes a step further than information provision, although the line of demarcation is necessarily imprecise since the aim of education' is to influence behaviour. The trade-off approach is perhaps the most notable feature of incomes policy developments within the sample, except in Germany and France. In the Netherlands, for example, a dramatic schism occurred after the years of tightly controlled incomes policy.