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The period between the two World Wars was remarkable; mass unemployment, protectionism, diverse exchange rate regimes, the disintegration of world trade, poor growth prospects and high business cycle volatility. This comprehensive textbook surveys key questions arising from the British economy from 1919 to 1939: Why was unemployment so high? Did a fast transition to the pre-1913 gold parity lead to a low growth equilibrium? Why were interwar business cycles so volatile? Did tariffs stimulate economic recovery in the 1930s? A comparative approach is adopted throughout. For example, the question of gold parity is contrasted with countries that allowed their currencies to depreciate. The book is aimed primarily at students studying economic history. The book continually applies economic theory to historical examples enabling students to evaluate the relevance of competing theoretical frameworks

Solomos Solomou presents a clear and systematic examination of the evidence for long-term patterns of economic growth. Using data on Britain, France, Germany, the USA and the world economy between 1850 and 1973 he refutes the existence of long (Kondratieff) waves in the course of economic development. Instead he presents persuasive evidence for a growth pattern characterised by shock-induced, long-term variations in growth at the level of the world economy. The findings show that national patterns of growth did not necessarily coincide with those of the world economy, but followed episodic long swing fluctuations of twenty to thirty years before the Second World War and trend-accelerated growth in the post-war period. The author provides new historical perspectives on the pre-1913 era, the inter-war years and the post-war boom

During 1850–1913 the growth of the world economy was not steady. The observed variations are described with the phrase "G-waves." In contrast to Kondratieff long waves, G-waves lack a regular periodicity and amplitude.

The impact of protectionism is currently a contentious policy issue. This book evaluates the effects of protectionism on the British interwar economy. In contrast to most studies of the period and the conclusions of orthodox economic theory, Kitson and Solomou show that the introduction of the General Tariff in 1932 provided a substantial stimulus to the domestic economy - a stimulus which can help to explain the trend improvement in British economic growth in the 1930s. The authors show that the tariff made encouraging import substitution and macroeconomic expansion. The empirical evidence is examined at two levels. First, a sectoral study shows that the newly protected sector of the 1930s saw an improvement in performance following the introduction of the tariff. Secondly, the large fall in manufacturing imports generated favourable effects on macroeconomic performance by helping to reduce the import propensity of the economy. The policy implication of this study is that trade policies should be constructed in the context of prevailing economic conditions and not solely with reference to sometimes inappropriate theoretical perspectives

AbstractThis article brings together some of the improvements to GDP estimates from the income side since the publication of Charles Feinstein's 1972 volume National income, expenditure and output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965. Many of the improvements and refinements were made by Feinstein himself and this paper makes a start in bringing the different elements together, focusing chiefly on reconstructing the income‐based estimates for the period 1841–1920. The new data are then used to comment on several features of the late nineteenth‐century UK economy, considering both the trend and cyclical path of the economy. The new data, coupled with modern de‐trending methods, suggest that there was a long‐term slowing of the UK economy from the late nineteenth century, starting from the 1870s. To undertake the trend–cycle decomposition, we employ a wavelets methodology to describe the time–varying features of trends and cycles over this period.

This article uses a dataset covering ten advanced economies (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States) to explore the role of real wages as an influence on employment and unemployment in the Great Depression and more generally in the 1920s and 1930s. The distinction between employment and unemployment movements during the Great Depression helps to clarify the role of supply side influences on the national heterogeneity of unemployment increases during the Great Depression. We find little general econometric evidence for the idea that movements in product wages had strong influences on employment either during the period of rising unemployment associated with the depression of the 1930s or more generally with the data which exist for the 1920s and 1930s.

ABSTRACTDiscriminatory protectionist policies in the 1930s are assumed to have led to a collapse of multilateral trading patterns. This paper examines the trends in bilateralism during the interwar period for a sample of ten countries. The findings show that, with the exception of Germany between 1934 and 1938, the level of bilateralism fluctuated but did not see a significant trend increase in the period of increased protectionism during the 1930s.