Public Enterprise Revisited

A Closer Look at the 1954–79 UK Labour Productivity Record

Chrisafis H. Iordanoglou, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Crete, Greece

The book compares the 1954–79 labour productivity record of 5 expanding public sector industries to that of 24 expanding, capital intensive, mass-production industries in the British private sector. The author shows that the public sector industries’ labour productivity growth was significantly faster than that of the private sector industries. Strikingly, he also finds that the state-owned industries were narrowing their productivity gap with their US counterparts at a significantly faster rate than the private sector industries. Dr Iordanoglou concludes that it is possible that public ownership had – in the historical period investigated – a long-term positive effect on these industries.

‘Iordanoglou has carried out a very significant piece of work. His basic idea of comparing the growth rate of productivity in the public and private sectors over a 25-year period provides a very useful method of approaching the bigger question of the relative efficiency of public enterprise . . . The book deserves wide distribution.’
– John Calvert, Labour / Le Travail

‘The merits of the work include a critical examination of the conventional wisdom that British nationalised companies "failed" and the rejection of this standard view; the use of a highly original method, based on historical evidence, to examine the productivity performance of British industries; scrupulous treatment of the industrial statistics and a quite exemplary, path-breaking, approach to international productivity comparisons; a theory of industrial performance which makes full use of the latest theory, while situating industries in their social and political context.’
——约翰•Grahl大学versity of North London, UK