Resource Allocation in Wartime Britain

The essential feature of the British economy in the second world war was that it was a centrally managed economy. Such an economy can only succeed if the state can adequately allocate resources to where they are needed. In order to understand and to evaluate the wartime economy properly, we therefore need to know how resources were actually allocated, what problems were faced and how they were resolved.1 Indeed, given that all the major combatant nations in the second world war abandoned the price mechanism in favour of administrative controls, a proper evaluation of their wartime economic performance cannot proceed until the relative efficiency of their different systems of managing the economy has been assessed. One of the most vital wartime materials was steel. The importance of steel to the major economies engaged in the second world war cannot be overestimated: steel was a vital input into the tanks, aircraft and ships that were the backbone of their fighting machines and a crucial intermediate good in the war economies generally. In wartime Britain firms did not compete for steel on the open market; rather, their sponsoring state departments (the departments that placed the orders for aircraft, ships and tanks with the firms) made bids to a central government committee which then, on the basis of strategic priorities and its knowledge about production possibilities, allocated steel to them. One question that therefore arises is: were the steel allocations made on an

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