British Economic Policy and Performance since 1950: An Early Twenty-first-century Assessment

Despite all of the debate in the economic history literature that has attempted to qualify and quantify macroeconomic and microeconomic decisions, evaluate policy outcomes and seek to explain the precise causes of British economic growth since 1950, there is still not a unanimous verdict on, inter alia, the extent of Britain's economic decline. In many ways this is surprising, given there are sufficient figures which clearly show that the British economy has declined relative to her competitors over the last 50 years, particularly on the measure favoured by economists, namely GDP per capita. At a qualitative level, there have been a number of influential perceptions of decline, most of them decidedly gloomy about the state of the post-war economy (for example, Barnett, 1972; 1986; Shanks, 1961; Shonfield, 1958). In other ways, the inconclusiveness of the debate is less surprising, given the sheer ingenuity of some economic historians to make the glass seem half full when it is three-quarters empty.