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The aim of the study was to approach an assessment of the technological level of the economies in Eastern Europe, particularly in the newly-democratising countries—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland—by means of studying their innovative activity and productivity levels in comparison with the West.

Comparative labour costs in the manufacturing industries have been analysed in four previous issues of this Review based on surveys of labour costs published by the Swedish Employers' Confederation. These contain time series of wages for time worked, social charges and total labour costs in manufacturing for most OECD countries and convert them into a common currency. Although no allowance is made for the different purchasing power of the wages paid ('PPPs') the comparison is useful since the products of the industries of various countries compete on international markets on the basis of current exchange rates.

In view of the abundant resources of coal in the United Kingdom, it was natural that at the time immediately following the first oil shock in 1973 certain hopes were pinned on coal: that coal usage would recover enabling the country to reduce its high reliance on oil. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear by now that whilst the importance of oil in our energy supplies has indeed been reduced, it was not primarily due to any resurgence of the demand for coal. The production and consumption of coal have continued to decline.

The structural pattern of the economy is changing all the time. It has changed considerably in the past ten years (table 1), partly because of the emergence of oil production, but partly also because industries that previously constituted the mainstay of the UK economy—like steel, coal, textiles and mechanical engineering—have declined in importance whilst others, for example electronics and chemicals, have become the driving force of industry and certain types of services have grown out of all proportion to the national economy as a whole. This point can be illustrated by the fact that in the ten years to 1983 manufacturing output fell by 15 per cent, while at the same time the output of all services increased quite markedly and one section, banking, financial, business and professional services, insurance and leasing, grew by some 70 per cent.

Energy is a world issue and since future developments, particulary of oil, are of paramount importance to the UK economy, we have to take a world view. We start by discussing the prospects of the supply and price of oil; the outlook for other types of primary energy as well will be considered briefly.

The most recent peak in the production of UK manufacturing industries was in 1973; ten years later, in 1983, the level of manufacturing output was still 15 per cent lower.In the same period the official output index for services (as measured by value added and other methods) increased markedly and one of its sections—Division 8, covering banking and finance, insurance, leasing, business and professional services—grew particularly rapidly, by about 70 per cent.

The service industries—that is, all activities apart from agriculture and the production and construction industries—account for more than half of gross domestic product and employ about two thirds of the civilian labour force. The size of the employed labour force alone makes a brief analysis of productivity worthwhile; additional interest stems from the importance of the contribution of the internationally tradeable services to the balance of payments.

The National Institute studied the diffusion of new technologies more than ten years ago: our first report on this subject was published in 1969 followed by a major book. The purpose of the earlier studies was to analyse the introduction and diffusion of major postwar process innovations in several industrial countries, the factors which facilitate or hinder the adoption of the then new techniques, the pattern of diffusion and the influences to which it is subject. The analysis was based on the situation at the end of the 1960s. Since then the processes, which were then relatively new, have matured. In 1982 we started a new project in order to assess and analyse their diffusion in a later phase.