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.
在截至上世紀70年代末的一百年裏，英國經濟相對衰落，但這種趨勢已經逆轉。自那以來，英國已經追趕上甚至超過了它的主要貿易伙伴。這兩句話既非打字失誤，也非白日夢。它們是英國著名計量歷史學家尼古拉斯•克拉夫茨教授(Prof Nicholas Crafts)得出的審慎結論*。1979年，英國人均產出降到了德國與法國人均產出86%到90%的水準，但到2007年卻超過了它們1到6個百分點，與美國仍存在差距，但也已較以往縮小。至於更微妙的市場生產率的比較，英國仍落後於它的主要貿易伙伴，但已大幅縮小與它們的差距。不過，正是在這段經濟改善時期，對「英國衰落主義(British declinism)」的研究，成爲了衆多其他學者的主要課題。