Contemporary problems of economic policy: Essays from the CLARE group
- London Methuen 1983
- 154 p.
The papers from the CLARE Group contained in this book were originally published, except for the introduction, in the Midland Bank Review in the years from 1977 to 1982. No significant changes have been made in the text of the papers, so they represent views of current economic problems as they appeared at the time. Their general approach remains, we believe, as valid now as at the time when they were written. Certain respects in which the unfolding of events has altered the state of affairs or called for rethinking are mentioned in the introduction and in the postscripts appended to some of the chapters. But changes have not been made to the statistical tables to incorpor ate subsequent revisions.
The CLARE Group was formed in 1976, around the time of the famous IMF visit to London. British official economic policy was then in a state of some disarray. It seemed to a number of us that there was room for another voice to try to counteract the increasing polarisation that was appearing in discussions about economic policy in this country. On the one hand were those who wanted to throw away the Keynesian baby with the bathwater and give up all attempts at stabilisation policy. On the other hand were those who wanted to throw out the neo-classical baby with its bathwater and give up all attempts to make the market mechanism work. We were right about the polarisation. What we did not foresee was how much worse it would have become a few years later.
It was evident from the beginning that the retreat to the poles was occurring almost as much in discussions of microeconomic as of macroeconomic issues, and the Group's policy has been to address itself to both. The articles grouped in Part I are concerned with developments and policies in the UK economy at large and the world economy in which it has to live. Those in Part II are focused upon the industrial sector which had a particularly large share of the problems of the period. The four articles in Part III are directed at problems and policies in specific areas of the UK economy whose importance is not diminished by the fact that they can be more narrowly defined. These microeconomic articles contain analyses of structures and markets whose validity, relevance and intelligibility are to a large extent independent of the historical context in which they were written. In the case of the macroeconomic articles, however, it seemed desirable to provide some background in the form of an overview of what happened in the 1977-82 period and the implications for policy at the present time. This is the main purpose of the introduction which follows. It also attempts to draw together in a way to which the microeconomic articles did not obviously lend themselves- a number of the threads running through the period as a whole.