Public and private ownership of British industry 1820-1990
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Public and private ownership of British industry 1820-1990
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1994
Available at / 43 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Bibliography: p. [348]-373
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Britain led the way for much of the world with industrial privatization during the 1980s. Yet the historical origins of the process that was being reversed have rarely been examined. This is a study of public and private ownership in industries such as railways, gas, water, electricity, and telecommunications. Industries such as these rely upon a substanial physical distribution network that `channels' their service from source to destination. They thus
raise distinctive problems for government policy, as their requirement for some sort of unified system is incompatible with the coexistence of a number of competing service suppliers. Yet competition has been the traditional guarantee of `fair' and minimum prices in British industrial policy. This tension
between experience and ideology provoked a variety of government policies over the last two centuries.
Robert Millward and James Foreman-Peck provide a coherent and thorough economic history of the network industries, which continue to play an important role in the British economy. They trace the development of various institutional arrangements from the early nineteenth century until the end of the 1980s, and provide quantitative estimates of their performance. Their book offers a valuable historical approach to the contentious issue of privatization.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - government and the infrastructure in the 19th and 20th centuries
- competition in the new network technology industries 1820-1870
- the political response to market failure - railways and other national communications networks 1870-1914
- prices, profits and government - gas and telegraph in the late-19th century
- explaining the shift to public ownership at the local level - the halcyon days of municipal ownership 1870-1920
- ownership and cost effectiveness - evidence from the early-20th century
- international comparisons of performance in national networks in the inter-war period
- the causes and content of the 1940s nationalizations
- the performance of the nationalized industries 1950-1985
- privatization of industry in the 1980s
- networks in perspective.
by "Nielsen BookData"