Forging Ahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back: British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis
by Nicholas Crafts (Author)

About the Author
Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economic History at the University of Warwick, is one of the leading international experts on productivity and the causes of economic growth, and especially the role of new technologies. This expertise about technologies of the past has made him one of the most interesting thinkers on the new technologies of today, and he is currently co-directing a major research project on large-scale technological change. Ian Gazeley is Senior Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Sussex. Ian works on living standards and poverty in Britain 1880-1950. His research has been primarily concerned with quantitative measures of working class living standards. Andrew Newell is Head of the Department of Economics and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. He is a labour economist with research interests in wage determination and unemployment, with a special interest on the impact of structural economic change.

About this book
To what extent has the British economy declined compared to its competitors and what are the underlying reasons for this decline? Nicholas Crafts, one of the world's foremost economic historians, tackles these questions in a major new account of Britain's long-run economic performance. He argues that history matters in interpreting current economic performance, because the present is always conditioned by what went before. Bringing together ideas from economic growth theory and varieties of capitalism to endogenous growth and cliometrics, he reveals the microeconomic foundations of Britain's economic performance in terms of the impact of institutional arrangements and policy choices on productivity performance. The book traces Britain's path from the first Industrial Revolution and global economic primacy through to its subsequent long-term decline, the strengths and weaknesses of the Thatcherite response, and the improvement in relative economic performance that was sustained to the eve of the financial crisis.

Brief contents
1 Introduction
2 The First Industrial Revolution
3 American Overtaking
4 The Interwar Years: Onwards and Downwards
5 Falling Behind in the ‘Golden Age’
6 From the Golden Age to the Financial Crisis
7 Concluding Comments
References
Index

Pages: 160 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Reprint edition (September 20, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781108438162
ISBN-13: 978-1108438162