interior Planning The 'public sector' as it is rather grimly called, and the way it is financed, stafiFed, and developed, is a force which the rest of industry and commerce can no longer disregard. It is, in fact, often complementary to it. Large State undertakings become customers of smaller, private ones; conversely, the 'private sector' depends increasingly on the services which the 'public sector' supplies. Fuel, power, and transport are examples. The growth of the great State Corporations in Britain like the Port of London Authority, the B.B.G., or the London Transport Executive and the development of the nationalized undertakings such as the National Coal Board, the British Electricity Authority, British Railways, and the Bank of England are examples of how the State, in addition to its responsibilities for the great political issues of Defence, Education, and a host of others, is also committed on behalf of State enterprises to the creation of an economic framework within which management has got to work. When the framework is well contrived it can be of great assistance to management, but when it is bungled it can disastrously affect management's task. Consider the control of inflation. However hard managements may try they are powerless, in the grip of State mismanagement, mistiming, or miscalculation, to check what the economists describe (but are not quite sure about) as a growing menace. Or a strike in a nationalized undertaking with its paralysing effect on normal trading routine. Or the relative effects of different instruments of Government policy monetary, fiscal, controls which can either encourage or discourage a business development. But this section is not concerned with the way the State behaves or misbehaves in the matter of the economy. Politicians have written, spoken, and debated billions of words in defence of their policies and the final sanction in the West rests with the voter. The task here is, rather, to analyse what business managernents should do about the State not what the State should do about them. One must be careful of words. The State and the Community are really one. With the increase of Government intervention in everyday affairs it has become customary to think of the Government as the State with disquieting undertones of the totalitarian countries in mind. That this confusion exists is not surprising; governments, not so much the politicians but the civil servants, tend, more and more, to become anonymous and faceless as their influence becomes the more pervasive. The previous section looked at management's relations with the Community in a narrower almost a 'neighbourhood' context. The Esso Petroleum Company in a document Where we Stand combines the Community and the State very realistically and writes : Since a company is an integral part of the social and economic life of the community be it locally or nationally it is under an obligation to condtfctyts business in such a way as to further the social and economic progress of the community, or at very least not to impede it. personal finance