Towards the Managed Economy

Taylor & Francis

This is a major study of economic policy making in Britain between the wars. It provided the first full-length analysis of the early development of fiscal policy as a tool of modern economic management. The central question addressed is how Keynesian fiscal policies came to be adopted by the British government, with particular attention paid to the role of the Treasury and to that of Keynes himself.\nDrawing extensively on unpublished documents hitherto untapped by economists or historians, Roger Middleton challenges the widely held view of official economic thinking as an ill-informed group of people holding \u2018the Treasury view\u2019 in opposition to Keynes\u2019s prescriptions for deficient demand and mass unemployment. Instead he argues that acceptance of Keynesian economics during the Second World War resulted from political and administrative factors as much as a conversion to Keynesian theory. He investigates the form and impact of fiscal policy during the 1930s and, throug.