This comprehensive new study gives a full account of the formulation of British economic policy in the twentieth century, drawing on the most recent research based on documents made available under the thirty-year rule to give detailed insight into policy-making in the 1950s and bringing the narrative right up to the end of the 1980s.

The book offers both a lucid narrative description of the evolution of policy from the turn of the century through the First World War, recovery, the Depression, the Second War and its aftermath, the `Keynesian Revolution', and the shifts and about-turns of more recent decades, and a coherent analysis of these processes. Covering both macro and micro issues, the text is structured in such a way as to give due weight to all the various influences at work: institutional aspects, such as the changing role of policy-making ministries, as well as political debate and economic theory.