Colin Haslam

Persuasion Without Numbers? Public Policy: The Justification of Capital Charging in the NHS Trust Hospital

Using the example of capital charging in UK hospitals, this paper shows how new public policy initiatives are justified through forms of persuasion without numbers and can be challenged with empirics. A reading of official and academic texts shows how the official problem definition focuses on poor asset utilisation. Hospital accounts are then reworked to show that, although poor asset utilisation was never a major problem, the introduction of capital charges could disrupt service provision. The conclusion is that the operation of NHS hospitals should be understood in terms of distributive conflict, rather than inefficiency. Through practical demonstration, the authors of this article aim to encourage accounting researchers to use numbers to challenge public policy definitions.

Cars After Financialisation: a case study in financial under-performance, constraints and consequences

This paper presents data on the financial results achieved in the 1990s by 12 major car assemblers from the USA, Europe and Japan. While some assemblers have defensible records of share price appreciation, their return on capital employed is generally mediocre and well below the level that US and UK stock markets require. This under-performance reflects ubiquitous product market constraints and, specifically, spreading direct competition, which leaves many assemblers precariously dependent on the few segments where indirect competition prevails and where profits are divided between two or three incumbents. Financial under-performance persists into the 2000s because a variety of conditions, including family control and national differences in the valuation of car companies, inhibit a global restructuring that would raise profitability. Insofar as financial under-performance by assemblers has major consequences, the end result is to increase the messy and unresolved character of present day capitalism.

The Crisis of Cost Recovery and the Waste of the Industrialised Nations

This paper argues the case for shifting the problem of advanced country competitivity onto the terrain of social accounting. It introduces new concepts such as cost recovery and social settlement, before presenting a range of empirical evidence which demonstrates the nature and extent of the current Western crisis about cash generation. The argument and evidence has important implications for policy. Under present conditions, free trade between high and low wage countries is likely to increase disemployment and encourage a pathological mutation of corporate behaviour and social institutions in the advanced countries.

British Pharmaceuticals: a cautionary tale

British pharmaccuticals is generally represented as a successful sector which illustrates the potential of knowledge-intensive, high-valve-added activities. This article presents a revisionist account based on evidence and argument. Pharmaceuticals is a small sector which combines high-value-added and average wages to benefit capital not labour. The knowledge base in the laboratory creates imitative product with marketing then applied to capture social expenditure. When product-market growth slows, the sector restructures defensively without solving its problems.

Representing the household: in and after national income accounting

Explains how and why the household should, and could, be an object of analysis for a new social accounting. It shows that the household has been neglected in national income accounting, which generally tends to represent it as a black box. It also shows how the data from national income accounting can be reworked to demonstrate the importance of the household at macro and meso levels. The reworking shows that 84 per cent of GDP passes through the household just as, at the meso level, there are important differences between households in how they pool, spend and save income.

Management accounting: the Western problematic against the Japanese application

Management accounting (MA) in Japan as practised by a group of leading companies is often described and compared to the principles of MA in the Anglo-American tradition as exemplified in leading texts. Western textbook MA is shown to be a poor basis for productive intervention because it rests on a defective implicit model of manufacturing production which takes a single-product, single-process view of production and neglects the gains in labour and capital efficiency which can be realised by low stocks, small batches, faster set-up and improved layout. Little attention is paid to new product planning and development, whereas leading Japanese firms give these aspects of practice a privileged place corresponding to investment project appraisal in Western theory. The Japanese application of MA is shown to be of both intellectual interest and practical importance: it enables the exploitation of points of intervention which have been invisible (mostly) in the West, allowing Japanese companies to generate continuous cost reduction.

Sinking Ships? Liberal Theorists on the American Economy

In the Asia-Pacific region, the conditions and consequences of East Asian success have understandably attracted more attention than the causes and implications of North American failure. In the American case, any failure must be relative when the US remains a bloc-sized market and the only surviving superpower. Thus, for Asians the US figures economically as an export opportunity and socially, for puritans like Lee Kuan Yew, as a warning about decadence. The discussion among Americans is altogether more interesting. This article analyses the debate about national competitiveness among American liberal democrats like Magaziner, Reich, Tyson and Krugman and looks behind the differences of position that separate these protagonists, with two conclusions. First, as the old 1980s problem of national uncompetitivencss is jettisoned in the 1990s; all the liberals now agree that Americans are no longer in the same boat, that while some are becoming increasingly successful, others are sinking fast. Second; the protagonists have moved from an industrial policy fix in the 1980s to an end of policy era in the 1990s where the question for American liberals is whether and how the political system can absorb the stresses createted by increasing inequality.