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The Sources of Recovery in UK in the 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

G. D. N. Worswick
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Extract

Britain, like any other open economy, is linked through exports and imports to the movements of prices and production in the world at large. But the emergence of the City of London as a major international financial centre forged an extra link between the fortunes of the British and world economies, which was still very strong in the inter-war period. It is appropriate, therefore, to preface this account of the economic recovery in Britain after the Depression with a brief reminder of the circumstances prevailing in the world economy at that time.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 110 , November 1984 , pp. 85 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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References

page 85 note (1) Unless stated otherwise figures for output. employment, prices and so on are taken from C. H. Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the UK 1855-1965, Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1972. GDP is the ‘compromise’ estimate.

page 86 note (1) General survey, 1929-1937, Britain in Recovery, British Association report, Pitman 1938.

page 86 note (2) Page references to the Panel paper are given in this manner throughout.

page 86 note (3) MacDougall, G. D. A., op. cit.

page 86 note (4) Bellman, H., The Building Trades, Britain in Recovery, Bri tish Association report, Pitman. 1938.

page 88 note (1) E. H. Phelps Brown and G. L. S. Shackle, ‘British economic fluctuations, 1924-38’. Oxford Ecoizomic Papers, No. 2, May 1939.

page 88 note (2) All building, and not only housebuilding, is included in the consumers' durable employment series. This series does turn up before producers' durables, and the lag looks of the order of six months. The figures for investment show that while dwellings rose by £41 million at 1938 prices between 1932 and 1933, other fixed investment was still falling though more slowly. These investment figures are suggestive of a lag of more than six months, though no very firm inference of this kind should be drawn from annual data. In any case some of the employment in producers' durables, in iron and steel, quarrying, tubes, wires and electrical wiring would be required for housebuilding.

page 89 note (1) Pitman, 1935.

page 90 note (1) N. H. Dimsdale, Monetary policy and the exchange rate, 1920- 1938, in The Money Supply and the Exchange Rate, Eltis, W. A. and Sinclair, P.J.N. (eds), Oxford University Press, 1981.

page 90 note (2) S. Howson, Domestic Monetary Management in Britain, 1919-38, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p.91.

page 90 note (3) Beenstock et al. believe that impact of the Conversion on long- term interest rates ‘was trivial’ (p.64) and they ‘agree with Kcynes's contemporary judgement that the Conversion was just a flash in the pan, propped up by newspaper propaganda and patriotic appeals just long enough for the Treasury to attain its immediate object’. Unfortunately, they have misunderstood Keynes's words and have attributed to him a view which is the opposite of the one he actually held. The quotation comes from an Appendix to the Fourth Report of the Economic Advisory Council, which was written soon after the launching of the Conversion. They express Keynes's anxiety lest the initial effects on long-term interest rates should prove ‘a flash in the pan …’ (see R. S. Sayers, Bank of England 1891-1944, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p.447). He was worried that, after the Conversion had been com pleted, interest rates might rise again. As we know, of course, far from rising, long-term interest rates were to come down even further after the Conversion. Keynes's judgement about the Con version was consistently that it was both important and successful. In the Economic Journal of September 1932 he wrote: ‘The suc cessful conversion of the War Loan to a 3½ per cent basis is, therefore, a constructive measure of the very first importance’ (Collected Writing of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XXI, p.114), and in an open letter to President Roosevelt published in the New York Times in December 1933, he wrote: ‘The turn of the tide in Great Britain is largely attributable to the reduction of long-term rate of interest which ensued on the success of the Conversion of the War Loan. This was deliberately engineered by the open market policy of the Bank of England’ (Collected Writings Vol. XXI, p.297). The long-term interest rate had risen in the Gold Standard crisis and had started to fall in January 1932, whereas the Conversion did not begin until the summer. It was easy to get short- term rates down in 1932; the problem was to convince the market that the long-term rates of 4½ and 5 per cent which had prevailed in the 1920s were ‘abnormal’ and that much lower rates had come to stay. The propaganda accompanying the announcement of the Conversion was directed to this end and succeeded.

page 90 note (4) Figures from Marian Bowley, Housing and the States. George Allen and Unwin, 1945, p.279. There is a further discussion of cheap money and housing in P. N. Sedgwick's paper to the Bank Panel, op. cit., pp. 45-6.

page 91 note (1) Oxford University Press, 1944

page 91 note (2) ‘The constant employment budget balance and British budget ary policy, 1929-39,’ Economic History Review, May 1981.

page 92 note (1) S. N. Broadberry has made more technical criticisms. (Economic History Review, February, 1984). Middleton. he says, uses only one measure of fiscal stance, and he proposes a measure of ‘leverage’ and also ‘inflation adjustment’. In his reply in the same issue, Middleton questions whether the ‘Pigou effect’ for the various holders of the National Debt would have been as strong as Broadberry implies.

page 92 note (2) Mark Thomas, in Economic History Review, November 1983, estimated that a million man-years of employment were generated by rearmament, and he remarks that: ‘The success of rearmament in creating employment, even at the top of the cycle, leads us to view the eschewment of fiscal policy in the thirties as a missed opportunity for the economy’.

page 92 note (3) London Business School, Economic Outlook 1978-1982, June/ July 1979, p.23.