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Fifty Years of Economic Research: a Brief History of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research 1938-88

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Kit Jones
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Extract

The National Institute was founded in 1938, after a first initiative by Sir Josiah Stamp in the early 1930s. Stamp, who was the President of the London Midland and Scottish railway, had been connected with a Rockefeller Foundation scheme to provide fellowships in the social sciences; he became convinced that a wider attack was needed on the problem of financing the social sciences in Britain and his objective became the development of a central unit, of British origin, with funds under its own control. This would supplement and replace the help given by the Rockefeller Foundation (then the main source of research funds in the British social sciences) and develop an increasingly large research effort in economics and related subjects. Stamp made known his views and with the support of a number of prominent academics, in particular William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics; Henry Clay, Economic Adviser to the Bank of England; and Hubert Henderson, Secretary of the Economic Advisory Panel, began to search for British financial support.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 124 , May 1988 , pp. 36 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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References

(1) Bowley's book was first in the series of economic and social studies. In view of the extensive literature that has emerged from the Institute, there is no attempt to list the publications in the text of this history. A complete list of Institute books and occasional papers appears at the end. In addition there have been hundreds of articles published in the academic journals and other periodicals as well as over 200 published in the National Institute Economic Review.

(2) Since the mid-1950s the Institute's series of economic and social studies and occasional papers have been published for the Institute by the Cambridge University Press under a commission agreement. Conference papers were published first by Heinemann Educational Books and then by Gower Publishing Company.

(3) The terms of the grant awarded for 1987-91 for the first time specifically excluded the actual domestic forecasts published in the Review.

(4) It seems probable that Keynes himself would have disapproved of his name being associated with the Institute in this way. In 1942 he was invited by Sir Henry Clay to become the President of the Institute following the death of Lord Stamp. He declined partly because he was too busy but also on the grounds that he was ‘only in limited sympathy with the work of the Institute as it has been carried out so far’. He recognised that the war probably had something to do with this, but in his reply to Sir Henry Clay he expressed his view that ‘money has been spent in paying people to write books of no great value which it is much healthier they should write on their own responsibility in their spare time whilst earning their living in some other way. Books written for pay are seldom any good as compared with the works that an author simply cannot help writing.’

(5) The Technical Change Centre was wound up in 1987 when the ESRC did not renew its grant.

(6) A further six books financed by the SSRC were published between 1983 and 1987 when the series ceased for lack of finance.

(7) The Social Science Research Council was renamed the Economic and Social Research Council in 1984.

(8) By 1987/8 total income in real terms was 30 per cent less than its peak in 1975/6 and public funds provided just under half the total compared with 80 per cent 12 years before.

(9) The autumn of 1983 saw the setting up by the macroeconomic consortium of the ESRC of a Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau at Warwick University. The objects were to improve the efficiency and value of the models of the British economy produced by the programmes financed by the ESRC and to increase general understanding about them. It was hoped it would increase the accessibility of the models by developing software, improving appraisal techniques and providing a forum for discussing them. Since then the Institute has collaborated with the Bureau, attending these discussions and lodging the model there, where it was found in one of the Bureau's published reports to be the most ‘data coherent’ of the models they examined.