0 a situation in which a government, etc. spends less or reduces costs: --
Facing retrenchment can be a frightening experience.
The downturn in business has resulted in many retrenchments.
In retrenchment, central government may seek to limit the total expenditure of all local governments for economic stabilization.
1 the act of spending less or reducing costs: --
Businesses are going for growth, after the retrenchment of recent years.
The big retrenchment in aerospace manufacturing in the early 1990s eventually infected the entire state economy.
The closures will be the first substantial retrenchment at the store for 10 years.
2 the act of removing a worker from a job as a way of saving the cost of employing them: --
Furthermore, in some programme areas the losers from retrenchment are diffuse and the gainers are focused.
Moreover, while the welfare state is under pressure, it does not automatically follow that governments will seek to undertake retrenchment in all programme areas.
As always in times of retrenchment, elected officials have needed to win the goodwill of voters and interest groups for these unpopular cutbacks.
Path dependency made it difficult to achieve either retrenchment or structural change within the existing budget.
Retrenchment has not been easy, of course, and has often been less than successful, but in all these cases the process was essentially endogenous.
Advocates of retrenchment must persuade affected officials to transcend their special interests for the good of common goals.
Thus, retrenchment in some areas of the welfare state may be accompanied by expansion in others.
The further evil might also follow, and education itself, which is of primary importance to the country, would be prejudiced by retrenchments in other directions detrimental to educational efficiency.
