Globalisation and the UK Economy since the 1990s

Both the current UK coalition government and its New Labour predecessors have emphasised the impact of globalisation in shaping economic performance and appropriate economic policy. David Cameron and George Osborne have talked of Britain needing to be a winner in the global race, whilst Tony Blair and Gordon Brown repeatedly stressed the challenges of the global economy. Whilst there have been differences of emphasis, there is a large degree of continuity in their approach to globalisation for national economic policy. Not only traditional areas of macroeconomic and industrial policy, but also other areas, such as welfare and education policy, have increasingly been framed in terms of the challenges of globalisation. Moreover, the UK economy was already highly integrated internationally, with relatively high trade integration and longstanding international financial and trading links, as well as multinationals going back to nineteenth century trading companies (Held et al., 1999; Hirst and Thompson, 2000).