ABSTRACT
During the 1950s and early 1960s investment was regarded as the key to economic performance and growth by many people, inside and outside the government. Indeed the behaviour of investment came to be deployed as a key index of the success or failure of both the economy itself and the government’s attempt to manage it. This in part reflected the new availability of data on investment (though the figures remained highly imperfect by current standards), and their use by international bodies to provide plausible comparisons for the first time. This data creation in turn flowed from the Keynesian emphasis on investment as the key to short-run economic performance, which in these years was extended to attempts to understand longer-run behaviour. However, the role of investment in economic performance came eventually to be much disputed, both inside and outside government, and by the end of the Conservative period in office was tending to lose ground in policy debates to issues around the question of technical change. This switch in emphasis arose from a growing belief that investment per se was not the key to efficiency, so that the debates and policies on these two questions tended to be intertwined, and are sensibly treated together.
