Seeking a Premier Economy: the Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000.

• Position: Bureau Books - Brief Article - Book Review

Seeking a Premier Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000, edited by David Card, Richard Blundell, and Richard B. Freeman, will be available from the University of Chicago Press this spring. Part of the Comparative Labor Markets Series, the book is priced at $95.00.

In the 1980s and 1990s, successive U.K. governments enacted a series of reforms to establish a more market-oriented economy, closer to the American model and further away from its Western European competitors. Today, the United Kingdom is one of the least regulated economies in the world, marked by transformed welfare and industrial relations systems and broad privatization. Virtually every industry and government program has been affected by the reforms, from hospitals and schools to labor unions and jobless benefit programs.

This volume focuses on the labor and product market reforms that directly affected productivity...