Polityka zwalczania bezrobocia w Wielkiej Brytanii lat siedemdziesiątych i osiemdziesiątych oraz jej teoretyczne uwarunkowania

Abstract

The article discusses the problem of changes in the policy of fighting unemployment in Great Britain in the seventies and the eighties consisting in departure from the policy of stimulating overall demand and placing emphasis on various employment programmes, which were supplementing the laissez-faire economic strategy in the eighties. There are analyzed here theoretical determinants of these changes connected with a crisis of the Keynesian methods of economic policy and a renaissance of the neoclassical trend in the non-Marxist economics. Some role was also played here by changes taking place on the British political scene connected with the coming to power of the Conservatists. It is underlined that the applied measures to fight unemployment were of a highly limited character. Statistical data on unemployment quoted by the author point at an incomparably small scale of employment programmes in comparison with the scale of the unemployment phenomenon. On the other hand, the measures applied to fight unemployment were more effective in reducing structural unemployment.