The Supply Side and Competitiveness

Abstract

Industrial policy in the 1960s and 1970s was concerned with the management of decline; it sought to prop up declining industries and firms, easing the pain of the transition to a new type of economy. In many cases, the funds made available enabled firms that would have otherwise gone out of business to survive. By the 1990s, a new rhetoric had emerged. Michael Heseltine’s Competitiveness White Papers presented a series of supply-side measures intended to improve the ability of British companies to compete in the international economy. This emphasis on a range of supply-side measures has been continued under New Labour, notably in the 2001 joint paper from the Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry, Productivity in the UK: Enterprise and the Productivity Challenge (HM Treasury, 2001).