As others have said 1957 is pretty late in the day making it a rather hard challenge. If you'd said 1945, or even 1947, it would be somewhat easier. Case in point, I can't remember the exact numbers but didn't the UK spend large amounts of their US dollars purchasing tobacco in the post-war period? I can remember reading someone referring to it as money 'going up in smoke' and being rather surprised at how much it was. One solution would be to invest heavily in Rhodesia to expand their tobacco industry sooner, as a member of the sterling area wouldn't need to make purchases using valuable dollars. I'm sure there were probably other instances like this where efficiencies and better spending could have been made.
did a very smart thing when they created their Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. Instead it mostly seems to have been spent covering yearly governmental operating costs so once it was gone it was gone.
As for the pharmaceuticals and biotech industry I'd actually say that the UK does rather well in them, off the top of my head GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are both in the global top 10 of pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure that there are other British leaders out there in the smaller more niche areas as well.
What the governments should have done was spend aid money to rebuild infrastructure and help encourage the modernisation of industry - GermanyDear god, yes. The Marshall Plan was the biggest missed opportunity in this country ever. All too often manufacturing companies ate the seed corn instead of using the money to revamp their machinery. I remember that the Financial Times was still using printing presses from before the First World War in its old HQ, Bracken House, in the 1970’s.
did a very smart thing when they created their Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. Instead it mostly seems to have been spent covering yearly governmental operating costs so once it was gone it was gone.
Basically some very poor decisions in the late-WWII and early post-war government periods. Short version is that the government took secrecy over Bletchley Park and Colossus way too seriously and shot itself in the foot whilst in the US they organised a symposium and pushed the new knowledge out to various university professors and experts. The US government also spent large amounts of money on computers for both civil and military needs which helped fund the initial development of the industry, IIRC the government was IBM's major source of income in its early period. You also had the problems that whilst the US industry had a much larger potential market and generally coalesced into a few larger companies allowing them advantages of economies of scale in the UK the government was fairly reticent and the industry stayed divided between too many small companies when they really should have amalgamated into just two or three much sooner than eventually happened.Well with two of the best universities in the world and an active defense industry, I cant think of why they couldnt have built a tech ecosystem to compete with Silicon Valley or a booming pharma/biotech industry.
As for the pharmaceuticals and biotech industry I'd actually say that the UK does rather well in them, off the top of my head GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are both in the global top 10 of pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure that there are other British leaders out there in the smaller more niche areas as well.