Seeking a Premier Economy

Abstract

Eleven studies, conducted during 1998-2001, assess economic reforms that the United Kingdom adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those dealing with the labor and product markets that are expected to affect productivity, employment, and income inequality. Papers consider what two decades of British economic reform has delivered; the role of privatization; the extent to which the United Kingdom has moved from standard wage-employment contracts toward shared modes of compensation and the effect on firm performance; characteristics of foreign-owned firms in British manufacturing; the surprising retreat of unionism in Britain; pension reform and economic performance in Great Britain in the 1980s and 1990s; labor market reforms and changes in wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States; the roles of demographic, economic, and policy factors in changing poverty patterns in Great Britain and the United States; mobility and joblessness; whether in-work benefit reform has helped the labor market; and active labor market policies and the British New Deal for the young unemployed. Card is at the University of California, Berkeley. Blundell is at University College London and with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and its Economics and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy. Freeman is at Harvard University and with the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics.

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