ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the important economic policies in British politics. In transportation as in other areas, such as industrialization, the British attitude toward modern technology has remained fundamentally ambivalent. Economic policy has dominated British political life for most of the twentieth century. Economic policy is always part of the mandatory agenda, and the debate over what to do and how to do it has dominated Parliament and government. The role of the City of London as one of the three major centers of international finance has given it an important place in economic policy considerations, which some have argued has been detrimental to the domestic political economy as a whole and to manufacturing in particular. Economists conventionally divide their subject into two large categories, microeconomics–the behavior of individual firms and sectors, and macroeconomics–the behavior of the economy. Management of economic policy in the United Kingdom is a large and complex task, taking up much government time, personnel, and expenditure.
