Preface

Summary

Readers may recognise the provenance of the title of this book. To his study of Unemployment, published in 1909, W. H. Beveridge gave a sub-title, ‘A Problem of Industry’. That work had a strong empirical foundation in trade union records of allowances paid to their members during unemployment, in the reports of Distress Committees, and in other sources. His principal recommendations were for the improved organisation of the labour market through Labour Exchanges to be established throughout the country and for the extension of unemployment insurance. The change of one word in the sub-title, from ‘Industry’ to ‘Policy’, denotes more than the minimum necessary to differentiate the product: it signifies that unemployment is here placed in a broader setting, which includes what is nowadays called macroeconomic policy, and which gives greater emphasis to the international dimension, recognising that British prospects for employment and unemployment are bound up with foreign trade and the movements of capital, as well as regional and worldwide institutions such as the European Economic Community and GATT. Beveridge himself had moved a long way in this direction when he published Full Employment in a Free Society in 1944. If there is a link with the 1909 Beveridge in the choice of title, there is another with the 1944 vintage, inasmuch as the present author is a survivor of the team of European economists in Oxford who wrote the Economics of Full Employment, which appeared almost simultaneously with the other study, and whose influence on his own thinking Beveridge generously acknowledged.