ABSTRACT
The generation that experienced the Great Depression had seen how war generated full employment, and then witnessed one of the greatest Keynesian operations ever put into practice –the Marshall Plan. The prerequisite for success of the solutions offered by supply-side economics was therefore a climate of whole-hearted liberalism. Towards the end of the 1970s this was implemented by conservative governments in Great Britain and in the United States. The public sector – intended in the broad sense of state economic intervention via fiscal policy, public spending and partial or total state control over public bodies and companies – had expanded continually in the West, a process that had already started between the two world wars (First and Second World Wars) in some cases. The idea that state-owned companies had a determining role in eliminating monopolistic rents was opposed by an evidently neoliberal school of thought seeing efficiency as inseparably connected with private enterprise.
