Review: HM Treasury and Productivity in the UK

A central theme of international political economy is the comparative performance of national economies and the determinants thereof. In the debate over such performance ‘productivity’ has emerged a key term, and this paper is concerned with the way in which that term has been deployed in public policy debate in the UK. Its focus is on the ‘New Labour’ period (since 1997), in which the term has been central to the economic agenda of government. However, it is a term which has long been important in the lexicon of British social democracy, and this historical background is discussed here as a preliminary to treatment of the more contemporary material. The core argument of the paper is that the formulation of the productivity issue, and related terms like the ‘productivity gap,’ is both conceptually and statistically highly problematic, and forms an extremely insecure basis for the pursuit of public policy on the economy.