An Incomes Policy for the Professions

In 1951 the United States began moving toward an incomes policy, an attempt to end postwar wage and price inflation by linking changes in these prices to gains in productivity. Other countries later followed suit; some countries had already adopted wage and price control policies. The Netherlands moved toward an incomes policy immediately after World War II. Initially, the Dutch program involved wages only, but in the 1970s it became an accepted principle that private professional income should be comparable with the salaries of government officials and civil servants with comparable training and responsibilities. In the Netherlands (as in the United States and, before medicine was socialized, the United Kingdom) health professionals operate on a fee-for service basis and their incomes escalated as a result of both inflation and monopoly power. So they were subjected to the incomes policy. The policy's effectiveness in curbing income escalation cannot be determined with certainty-reliable data are lacking. However, the evidence indicates that the policy failed to achieve its original purpose

Economic growth · Economic policy · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Incomes policy · Inflation (cosmology) · Labour economics · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Monopoly · Power (physics) · Price level · Productivity · Wage · Wages and salaries · Healthcare Policy and Management · Primary Care and Health Outcomes

• Labor relations in the Netherlands

  John P Windmuller•Labor relations in the Netherlands•1969

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• European Industrial Relations

  Arthur Hochner•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1982

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• An Incomes Policy for Britain

  F W Paish, Frank Blackaby•The Economic Journal•1973

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• The Delusion of Incomes Policy

  William A Brown, William Brown et al.•The Economic Journal•1979

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• Education, Inequality and Life Chances

  Mark Blaug•The Economic Journal•1976

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