2 - The United Kingdom: ‘Victory at all costs’

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we aim to provide an overview of the mobilization of resources for World War II in the United Kingdom, using a framework to facilitate international comparisons. The next section examines the process of mobilization for war, which can be seen as an essentially short-run matter, best tackled using flow data from the national accounts. We then complement the macroeconomic approach of this section with an examination of the experience of industry. After that we turn to the impact of the war on economic development, an essentially long-run matter. This issue needs a national balance sheet approach to assess the impact of the war on the stock of wealth, broadly defined to include human as well as physical capital and intangible as well as tangible capital.

Mobilization for war

The scale of mobilization

We begin our analysis of the British war economy with an outline of developments in national income and the mobilization of resources. Table 2.1, using Feinstein's figures, reminds us of the considerable range of uncertainty over the path of real GDP during the war. Estimates based on expenditure and income are available for all years, while the output figures are only available for 1938 and 1946. Although the expenditure and income series are in broad agreement for the trend growth of GDP between 1938 and 1946, the expenditure series shows a substantially higher peak in 1943.