Recent Experience with Wage and Price Controls

Since the end of the Second World War, various western governments have attempted, by legal restraints or moral persuasion, to influence the way in which aggregate wages and/or prices change. Such actions are known as incomes policies or wage and price controls. In this chapter we review the recent experience of a number of countries in order to provide the background for the assessment of conventional incomes policies in Chapter 2. First, in section 1.2 we examine the attempts to impose wage and price controls in Germany in the thirties, under the Nazi government. Next we consider the postwar experience of incomes policies in the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand and Australia and conclude with references to studies of other countries.