ABSTRACT

Decline became an issue for governments in the 1950s and 1960s after they had already accepted responsibility for popular economic welfare, as part of the post-war settlement. The electorate showed no sign of accepting that economic performance was outside government control. Britain’s falling share of world trade was also commonly treated as a measure of failure. The de-industrialisation debate is also directly related to the use of investment figures to measure decline. Globalisation became a key word in economic debate in the 1990s. The rhetoric of competitiveness also threatens to focus attention on the other component of costs, especially non-wage labour costs, which means employers’ social security costs. Education and training had been looming larger and larger in Labour’s policy pronouncements from the late 1980s. The key issue for productivity at enterprise level is likely to be the pattern of deployment of labour as much as skills and education.