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This article analyses the changing political significance of UK balance of payments代写留学生论文 assessment inthe post-war era, seeking to explain its disappearance as a policy issue today. We demonstrate the historically contingent nature of balance of payments performance assessment by comparing its shifting, conjunctural, constructions, rooted in underlying political economic assumptions, across four periods in the 20th and 21st centuries. We argue that the political salience of UK balance of payments assessment is contingent upon structural changes (both ideational and material)within the global political economy and domestic Politics. Changes in the prevailing policy para-digm through which balance of payments was interpreted (for example from ‘embedded liber-alism’ to neo-liberalism), and redefinitions of balance of payments assessment techniques, both ofwhich happened on numerous occasions in the post-war world, had the effect of reshaping thenature of the external international political economic constraints to which UK governmentswere subjected.

Keywords: balance of payments; British politics; constructivist political economy;British economic performance

IntroductionIn
spring 2007 the broadsheet newspapers in Britain reported, for 2006, a particu-larly poor balance of payments performance. Gary Duncan of The Times noted‘Bleak figures showing Britain’s balance of payments plunging deep into the red ...the current account deficit ballooned to an all-time high of ￡43.3 billion’.1Thisshort piece, tucked away on an inside page, provoked no media comment, and eventhe official opposition neglected to castigate the government’s economic record inlight of this statistic. If we contrast this scenario with the early post-war years, itillustrates how the objectives of economic policy, and the importance attached tocertain yardsticks by which economic policy success and failure are judged, areinherently transient historical constructs.

For 30 years after 1945 British economic policy was obsessed with the paymentsposition; the predominant narrative of the economy in these years was one ofrecurrent balance of payments ‘crises’ (Eatwell 1982, 131–134; Gamble 1984,72–90; Burnham 2003, 14–15). In the post-war era, the constraints of the interna-tional political economy on the Keynesian welfare state would often ‘bite’ around the issue of balance of payments, with, for example, explicit targets often a centralfeature of the Letters of Intent which accompanied standby arrangements forborrowing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).2The balance of payments,and measurement thereof, was a crucial yardstick by which the IMF and othersjudged national economic policy rectitude. As the IMF’s official historian noted, in1987, ‘From its beginning, the Fund’s central concern has been the balance ofpayments positions of its members ... As of December 1986, balance of paymentsadjustment has remained a prime, perhaps the prime, issue in the internationalmonetary system and for the Fund’ (De Vries 1987, 1, emphasis in original).According to John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, the balance of payments continued tobe regarded as an economic ‘fundamental’ until the early 1990s:

Bibliography
Abdelal, R., Blyth, M. and Parsons, C. (forthcoming) ‘Constructing the international economy’, in本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。