Our struggle with illegal immigration will be nothing compared to in 10 years time
Across the political spectrum, the number of small boats crossing the Channel has occupied a huge slice of our collective consciousness. At one level, of course, these are stories replete with human suffering and tragedy. On another level, for those in the UK, it is a question of control over our borders. In trying to grapple […]
Britain’s car industry could weather a storm of tariffs better than you’d think
The latest American Economic Review contains a timely paper. Keith Head and Thierry Mayer, at the University of British Columbia and the Banque de France respectively, estimate the consequences of changes in tariff and non-tariff barriers to the car industry. They look at both US-led protectionism and Brexit, and calculate how these might change the […]
Stamp duty contortions and eco-warriors with private jets? Welcome to silly season
August is traditionally the silly season. Brexit makes this year slightly different, of course, but it is good to see a fine British tradition still being preserved. Silly stories abound. Sajid Javid was linked (erroneously, he now claims) with the idea of fixing the housing market by making sellers pay the stamp duty rather than the […]
Can we innovate better outside the EU? Economic lessons from the Nobel prize winner
Gordon Brown’s time as chancellor will be remembered for many things. A sense of humour would be conspicuously absent from this list. But he provoked a great deal of mirth unintentionally in a speech shortly before the 1997 General Election on the theme of “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. Perhaps the last laugh is with Brown. The […]
The UK’s capacity to innovate matters far more than panic over consumer spending
The debate about Brexit has become mired in a virtually incomprehensible quagmire of detailed and technical negotiations between the UK and the rest of the EU. Yet the campaign itself in 2016 was dominated by broader questions of political economy. In addition to the hurly burly of claims about extra NHS spending or Project Fear, […]
Let’s join the IFS in acknowledging our misplaced fetishisation of economic data
Tomorrow, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will publish its latest estimates on how much the UK economy grew between October and December 2017, compared to July to September. Last month, the ONS thought that there was an increase of 0.5 per cent. The economy cannot be put in a set of scales and measured. […]
Economists have lost the public’s trust by meddling in politics
Michael Gove famously said during the Brexit campaign that people “have had enough of experts”. Certainly, the outcome suggests that many were sceptical of the doom-laden economic projections of Project Fear. But what do the public think about economists themselves? An intriguing survey released last week by ING bank and the Bristol University Economics Network […]
Claims that a low tax, low regulation UK would be a disaster are rubbish
Dame Minouche Shafik, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, is leaving to become Director of the London School of Economics. Last weekend, she gave her final interview wearing her Bank hat. Shafik issued what was described in the media as a “thinly veiled warning” to the Chancellor, Phillip Hammond. She stated that it was […]
Why the economics profession remains blind to the benefits of Brexit
The office for National Statistics last week estimated that the UK economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent in the final quarter of last year. This is slightly above the long-term average growth of the past three decades. But a Financial Times survey this month showed that the majority of economists remain […]
Economic Research Council talk: why are so many economists opposed to Brexit?
Economic Research Council talk on Monday 20th February 18.30 – 20.00: I will be discussing why so many economists are opposed to Brexit. Book your ticket here. A limited number of Early Bird tickets are available for £15 each. Following a Financial Times survey in January that showed that nine times as many economists are opposed to […]
