Abstract
Since the end of the Second World War Britain’s economic performance has been highly respectable in historical terms. In the period 1950–73 gross domestic product (GDP) was rising at the rate of 3.0 per cent per annum, compared with only 1.3 per cent in the years 1913–50. Taking the same period, output-per-manhour in manufacturing industry increased by well over 200 per cent with gross fixed investment (other than in dwellings) running at a rate of 15 per cent of Gross National Product accelerating to more than 17 per cent from 1965 to the mid-1970s. As for the standard of living, between 1945 and 1974 the real weekly earnings of manual workers doubled, as did total consumers’ expenditure at constant prices. Between 1968–9 and 1974–5 — a period notable for the growing burden of personal taxation — average real incomes still rose by a substantial 17 per cent after tax. No wonder then that despite the extent to which consumption levels were periodically sustained by overseas borrowing, so notable a critic of Britain’s economic achievements as Sir Henry Phelps Brown could conclude in the later 1970s that ‘the British people today are far better supplied with the necessities and amenities of life and more fully provided with remedial and supportive services than ever in their history before’.1
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2. The Economic Record since 1945
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© 1991 M. W. Kirby
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Kirby, M.W. (1991). The Economic Record since 1945. In: Gourvish, T., O’Day, A. (eds) Britain Since 1945. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21603-1_2
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