ABSTRACT

The United Kingdom (UK) office machinery industry is concerned with the manufacture of typewriters, accounting, adding, calculating and punched-card machines, together with cash registers and duplicators. This chapter provides some general background information on the industry, and presents the interviewing and questionnaire results and the econometric tests of the pressure hypothesis. The authors’ field work was based on a sample of six firms, four of which were owned by United States' parent companies and the remaining two were UK companies. The chapter presents the allocative decisions, the profitability of exports, pricing policies and exports and domestic demand. It also presents some limited evidence on the export response of foreign-owned subsidiaries and UK companies at various levels of domestic demand. The UK office machinery sector being both a capital goods and a growth industry provides a useful contrast with the other industries in the authors’ survey.