The relative decline of the British economy in the century up to the late 1970s has been reversed. Since then, the UK has caught up with and even overtaken its principal trading partners. The previous two sentences are neither a typing mistake nor a daydream. They are the sober conclusions of the country’s leading quantitative historian, Prof Nicholas Crafts.* UK per capita output, which had fallen in 1979 to 86-90 per cent of German and French levels, was by 2007 1-6 per cent above theirs. There was still a gap compared with the US, but less than before. On a more subtle comparison of productivity in the market sector, the UK still lagged behind its main trading partners, but the gap had very much shrunk. Yet it was in just this period of improvement that an investigation of “British declinism” became a major industry among other academics.
在截至上世纪70年代末的一百年里，英国manbetx20客户端下载 相对衰落，但这种趋势已经逆转。自那以来，英国已经追赶上甚至超过了它的主要贸易伙伴。这两句话既非打字失误，也非白日梦。它们是英国著名计量历史学家尼古拉斯•克拉夫茨教授(Prof Nicholas Crafts)得出的审慎结论*。1979年，英国人均产出降到了德国与法国人均产出86%到90%的水平，但到2007年却超过了它们1到6个百分点，与美国仍存在差距，但也已较以往缩小。至于更微妙的市场生产率的比较，英国仍落后于它的主要贸易伙伴，但已大幅缩小与它们的差距。不过，正是在这段manbetx20客户端下载 改善时期，对“英国衰落主义(British declinism)”的研究，成为了众多其他学者的主要课题。