The recovery is well grounded – except in France
The coming year looks like it will be a good one. At the start of each of the past five years, the economic scales have been tilted down, and the challenge has been to look for factors which might have tipped them back up. This year, the balance is reversed. The onus lies with the […]
Britain’s New Industrial Policy: Can We Learn from the Mistakes of the Past?
The phrase ‘industrial policy’ seems to take us decades back in time. In 1964, a powerful catchphrase of the new Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was the need for Britain to embrace the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. Sadly, by the 1970s this vision had deteriorated into a list of institutions, stuffed with dull […]
Grangemouth highlights the competitive problems of the Rest of the UK
The recovery in the British economy is now firmly established. Output in the services sector, the largest part of the economy, is above the previous peak level prior to the crash in 2008. There is a widespread myth that the recovery is fueled by debt-financed personal spending. Yet since the trough of the recession in […]
Energy and Emissions: Taxation or Technology?
Energy prices are in the news. The recent actions of some of the energy companies can plausibly be described as provocative, no matter how well founded their decisions might be. They run the risk of provoking the ire of both the Opposition and the Government. One interesting aspect of the debate is that it has […]
Gresham’s Law in Education: How the Bad Drove Out the Good
Young adults in England have scored almost the lowest result in the developed world in international literacy and numeracy tests. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows how England’s 16 to 24 year olds are falling behind their Asian and European counterparts. England is 22nd for literacy and 21st for […]
Quis custodiet? Put the regulators on trial if they screw up
The Treasury’s amendments to the Banking Reform Bill mean that senior bankers could face up to seven years in jail for ‘reckless misconduct’ which leads to the collapse of a bank. Certainly, the behaviour of prominent individuals in the run up to the crisis left much to be desired. If only we could have put […]
Russia: how the crisis might affect future growth
The performance of the BRIC economies over the past decade or so has been mixed. Russian growth, though impressive by Western standards, has lagged that of both India and China. This is particularly true since 2008. I got an insight into the problem at a conference last week at the Economics Institute at St Petersburg […]
Is the ‘rent-seeker’ dying out?
The concept of the “rent seeker” is one of the most valuable in the whole of economics. The activity of rent-seeking involves obtaining money by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activity takes place, instead of getting paid for creating new wealth. It is a part of public choice theory, for which […]
Our economic recovery is real, but what we can still learn from the US?
Some people are never satisfied. The evidence is mounting that the UK economy is now on the path to recovery. But to those who denied the possibility of any economic revival at all under the policies of “austerity”, this is simply not good enough. It is the wrong kind of recovery, they say. Fuelled by […]
No interest rate changes for three years? Zero hours contracts for the Monetary Policy Committee!
The new Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said last week that interest rates will not be raised until unemployment falls below 7 per cent, a process he thinks will take three years. The battle of Austerlitz in 1805 was one of Napoleon’s greatest victories, leading to his complete domination of Continental Europe. […]
