Originally published in 1977, this book examines the choice of new production techniques available to the publicly owned industries during their first thirty years and the effectiveness with which these techniques were put to use. In the heat of political debate over nationalisation the basic economic issues involved are frequently obscured: this volume shows how the opportunity to gain advantages of scale offered by nationalisation and the new techniques which scale made possible were pursued by the public corporations through policies of innovation and the diffusion of technical advances.