Global Finance, Industry and Shareholder Value

Abstract

A key reason why the UK persisted with a pronounced pro-market stance — even after the Thatcher-Major years had delivered no increase in trend growth — was the intellectual climate that paralleled the emergence of a finance dominated global economy. We outline in section 6.2 how financial globalization shaped ideas on economic policy from the 1980s, and in particular macroeconomic and industrial policy. In section 6.3, we deal with the crucial question of how market orientation affected the institution of the firm so that the corporation as an institution no longer plays the relatively independent role in economic development that it once did.