The inflationary experience of the industrial countries in recent years is explained in terms of institutional and structural changes promoting wage-price momentum. Developments such as the increasing extent of indexation of incomes and flexibility of exchange rates tend to result in downward rigidity of the rate of change of prices and wages. In the extreme, this is seen to lead to stagflation as the normal economic condition, and to the ineffectiveness of exchange rate changes for adjusting external imbalances. While output and employment continue to respond to the application of monetary and fiscal policies, the wage-price mechanism lies increasingly beyond the reach of these conventional tools. It is argued that the sufficiency of stabilization policy is restored, as a medium-term tendency, to the extent that the inflation-sustaining links between wage and price changes can be systematically restrained, such as could follow from a permanent tax-based incomes policy.

This discussion draws upon the author's experience with the US General Accounting Offices's Energy Planning Review Team, which analyzed the planning processes and procedures (as well as the products) used by the US Department of Energy. It suggests that the DOE's preoccupation with ‘rational’ planning techniques in the face of incremental political and organizational realities explains many of the recent energy policy failures. These failures, however, viewed through an ‘adaptive-learning’ perspective provide valuable clues to potentially more successful analytical activities, and eventually, perhaps, more rational and systematic energy policies.

Little attention has been paid to the comparative study of the politics and administration of race in the USA and Britain. There exist certain important similarities between the two countries particularly with regard to the way in which even militant leaders are willing to co-operate with centrally funded community agencies and to moderate their demands to gain political and economic returns for their organisations from government. There are, however, structural differences between American and British community bodies which affect the success of those institutions in obtaining the allegiance of community militants and in more fully integrating moderate leaderships into local level participatory processes. In the USA the system encourages an apparently high degree of ‘voluntarism’ and ‘independence’ from direct central control through relative institutional autonomy. This is more conducive to group co-operation than Britain's more centralised community relations framework with its closer direct association with government and the so-called ‘white power structure’. Because, therefore, of the American version of ‘independence’ groups there are actually more effectively integrated than the British into governmentally funded institutions.

Although the NHS operates throughout the United Kingdom, it is organised, and services are planned, differently in each of the four countries: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Curiously, the differences are generally either overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant. Yet their persistence gives the lie to the view that the NHS is a highly centralised, monolithic entity. Moreover, they illustrate the paradox of considerable diversity within a unitary state. This paper examines some of the variations that exist, noting that recent changes in the organisation of health services have done little to modify these differences. Indeed, in regard to developments in the private health sector and to approaches to planning and priority-setting, the differences may, in future, become greater. For such a compact entity, UK policy analysts are surprisingly uninformed about practices occurring around them. The paper argues that there is a need for researchers and policymakers to pay more attention to intra-UK variations such as those evident in the NHS and to devise ways of ascertaining their impact on service delivery and, if possible, on performance.