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Coping the Recession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

PA Geroski
Affiliation:
Gatsby Foundation and the Centre for Business Strategy
P. Gregg
Affiliation:
Gatsby Foundation and the Centre for Business Strategy

Extract

The UK economy has suffered through two deep recessions over the last decade and, as a consequence, its productive structure has undergone a major transformation. The most visible consequences of these events include two waves of large scale job shedding (with profoundly different regional impacts) accompanied by persistently high unemployment throughout the 1980s and early-1990s. This time period has also seen steeply rising small and large firm failure rates, a major reshuffling in the ownership of many businesses, severe imbalances between the supply of and demand for certain types of skills exacerbated by regional immobilities in labour, a crisis of consumer confidence coupled with a reluctance by consumers to take on (or add to) their long-term debt, and a general decline in the authority and confidence with which demand management policies have been pursued.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

We are obliged to all of the companies who participated in the survey whose answers are reported here, to Thibaut Desjonqueres for able research assistance, to Andrew Britton and Nick Oulton for helpful comments on an early draft, and to the Gatsby Foundation and the Centre for Business Strategy for financial support. The usual disclaimer applies.

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