Politicians must understand that taxation is not a substitute for economic growth
In a speech last week, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party provided a ray of sunshine. I am not taking bets, by the way, on the number of times this particular sentence has been written. But Anas Sarwar was making a serious point which is of critical importance not just for Scotland, but for […]
Years on, we still haven’t learnt to quantify the damage done during the pandemic
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest independent scientific academy. Last week, some of its scientists trespassed onto public policy with a report on how effectively lockdowns and other measures such as mask wearing reduced the number of cases during the Covid-19 pandemic. At one level, the work was thorough and scrupulous. More than fifty scientists […]
Keep dreaming if you think Brexit is the reason craft beer breweries are going bust
A couple of weeks in the Highlands is always refreshing; the scenery is fantastic and the locals are welcoming, even if the weather has been typical of a very British summer. The experience was only marred in one respect: it was virtually impossible to obtain a pint of hand-pumped traditional bitter in the pubs. This […]
House prices will eventually start to fall, as long as owners accept their new reality
Economic news has had few moments of optimism lately: living standards are being squeezed and the overall level of economic activity, as measured by GDP, remains lower than it was in the second half of 2019. Yet house prices are holding up well. In the year to May 2023 average house prices are estimated to […]
Edinburgh Fringe fame for a one woman show is proof of the randomness of celebrity
The Edinburgh Festival is in full swing and the number of performers is almost incredible: the overall total this year is estimated to be around 50,000. A small fraction are already established names; an even smaller fraction may become famous as the festival unfolds. But most will return home just as unknown as when they […]
The big beasts of banking, supermarkets and tech are behind our productivity slump
The mystery of the dramatic slowdown in productivity growth across the West since the late 2000s remains unsolved. It is the key question in political economy. If productivity doesn’t rise, national income per head of population remains flat. As a result, government receipts from taxation remain static. In the UK, where the limits to taxation […]
Even if the pandemic hadn’t happened, we would have all ended up working remotely
Working from home is a phenomenon we still associate with the pandemic. Some companies are trying to reverse its growth and get more people back into the office, but the debate about productivity has failed, so far, to yield conclusive results. A fascinating and timely Stanford research paper, entitled “The evolution of working from home”, […]
If politicians keep ignoring economists, our strategies will never be cost-effective
Economists have been getting bad press because of the antics of the Bank of England and its Monetary Policy Committee. We are suffering from what we, as economists, describe as a “negative externality”. It might be convenient for you to drive your car, for example, but the emissions which this creates have a negative impact […]
Sunak should be modelling his fiscal rules on Clem Attlee’s, not Margaret Thatcher’s
Normally, reading economic statistics is, for almost everybody, a sure-fire way of curing insomnia. Not anymore. The Office for National Statistics came out with yet another attention-grabber last week. Government debt in the UK, the august body pronounced, is now bigger than GDP for the first time in over 60 years. The statisticians did qualify […]
The Bank of England risked our economy by believing a Peter Pan myth on inflation
The Bank of England has finally accepted that it needs to react to the growing criticism of its failure to either predict or control the persistently high rate of inflation. In response to demands from the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons, the Bank has decided to commission a broad external review of its […]
