Thomas1195
Banned
That seems like a big ask with the Great Depression and global trade collapsing no matter what they do.
Thomas, raising average annual growth by even 2% over 22 years will have an impact, but would be somewhere between extraordinarily hard and impossible to sustain, particularly as the period includes several recessions, a Depression and the flat 1920s; it is possible in a computer game, but not in real history. Economic growth isn't something that sticks forever, particularly if it took Britain until 1924/25 to simply get back to a 1914 level. If you want to alter the trajectory of the British economy, you need to do what you've done elsewhere and go back to the 19th century. Even if we fiddle with dates, the Soviet Union will eventually overtake Britain in raw GDP, whether it is 1947, 1955 or 1960. Now, the British standard of living was better, along with a number of other measures. These don't amount to much in the hard power stakes.
I mean from 1923-1929, and then 1931-1939. If Britain did not return to Gold in 1925, combined with Land Value Tax (a very big tax in terms of revenue), there would be plenty of room for Keynesian spending on public works. Spending on public works to improve infrastructures like roads, housing, telephone and electricity supply would both create demand for industries and raise national productivity, and this would be much better than the wait-and-see policy like IOTL, as it was clear that IOTL the private sector did not do much in these areas. Also, the industrial unrest between labour and employers should have been tackled during this period rather than in 1980s. Worse, IOTL, the Geddes Axe also rolled back education spending, which is vital for improving human capital.
And it's not guaranteed that population growth would not be higher than IOTL if British economic growth was stronger. During the interwar and especially postwar and even before ww1, Japan and many other Western countries like Germany experienced significantly higher population growth than the UK.