Public Enterprise Revisited: A Closer Look at the 1954–79 U.K. Labour Productivity Record. By Chrisafis H. Iordanoglou. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001. Pp. xi, 672. $115.00.

Extract

This book has an important message. Conventional wisdom has it that nationalized industries were a particularly inefficient part of the British economy in the three decades or so after the Second World War. Chrisafis Iordanoglou has produced an extremely thorough demolition of this notion, at least in so far as it relates to productivity performance. His conclusion, after several hundred pages of detailed statistical analysis, is that the record of the nationalized sector (largely transport, communications, and fuel) over the period 1954–1979 was better than that of British manufacturing, which was largely private, and the comparable infrastructure industries in the United States.