ABSTRACT
In the first three decades after the Second World War, the period of the developed capitalist world’s ‘long boom’ (Purdy 1976) or ‘golden age’ (Glyn et al. 1990), relatively full employment was accompanied by continuous and gradually accelerating inflation, culminating in the price explosion of the 1970s. By the end of the 1970s the explicit or implicit policy commitment to maintaining full employment that had been adopted by most governments in the period following the war had been replaced in most countries by an explicit prioritization of antiinflationary policy. This ushered in two decades of stagflation during which low growth rates were accompanied by high levels of unemployment and still high rates of inflation. By the mid-1990s, however, inflation had fallen to levels not seen since before price explosion of the 1970s and some commentators had begun to talk of the ‘death of inflation’ (Bootle 1996).
