Prime, Policy Research in Macroeconomics

By Hasan Cömert & T. Sabri Öncü This article first appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly on 18 March 2023. This article is the second in a series of articles on monetary policy debates in the age when deglobalisation became a buzzword. Here, we begin our discussion of the ongoing economic experiment in Turkey as an example to elaborate on these debates. In the third article, we will turn our attention to the post-2018 Turkish currency crisis phase of the experiment by focusing...

Another week goes by.  Hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly public sector, on strike last week, and again this week. Pay deals way below inflation. Zero movement from government.  Continuing disruption and decay. Why can’t a settlement be reached? Just before Christmas, Prime Minister Sunak told us “I want to make sure that we reduce inflation and part of that is being responsible in setting public sector pay..” On 1st February, Mr Sunak’s Official Spokesman said “We want to have...

This article first appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly on 12 November 2022. Monetary Policy Debates in the Age of Deglobalisation This article is the first in a series of two articles on monetary policy debates in the age in which deglobalisation is a buzzword. The ongoing monetary policy debates of the age will be discussed by focusing on macroprudential measures, capital controls and central bank independence in Part II. Introduction In a recent article, Kornprobst and Wallace...

This article first appeared in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly on 18 July 2022. A Murder in Konya Konya is a province in Turkey. On 6 July 2022, about an hour before I started writing this article, a murder news hit the Turkish pages of the internet: “In Konya City Hospital, a patient shot and killed a cardiologist and his secretary today.” Whether the assassin committed suicide or the private security killed him is unknown, although there are both rumours. City hospitals,...

Our new research report, published today, looks at the state of the UK’s labour market, based on the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics. It compares these recent data with those from 2019, and sometimes with earlier data. You can download the report here. The report looks at a wide range of issues, including size of the workforce, the economically active and inactive, employees and self-employed, full and part-time workers. It also examines data on developments in...

 Kaye Wiggins in the Financial Times explains that private equity groups, including Blackrock, deliberately inflate the value of their own assets – by buying and then selling said assets to themselves. She shows that the buyout business resembles a pyramid scheme with “circular” deals sold between and within private ownership at high valuations – fuelling asset price inflation. “Windscreen repair and replacement company Belron, which operates internationally under brands including Autoglass...

Over 30 years ago, Kunibert Raffer (University of Vienna) was first to propose a fair and transparent arbitration process between debtors and creditors for resolving sovereign insolvency, by analogy with Chapter 9 US Bankruptcy Code that provides for an orderly resolution in cases of municipal bankruptcy. (See his paper “What’s good for the United States must be good for the World – Advocating an International Chapter 9 Insolvency”). He is a long-standing critic of the IMF in its lending...

This is a speech delivered to the staff of the University of Helsinki, and to hundreds of students awarded masters’ and doctorate degrees, on the auspicious day of 22nd May, 2022. One of the requirements of the conferment committee was that all speeches should include another language. I therefore began mine in Afrikaans. After the pause below, I summarise the content of the opening paragraphs, so bear with me… Ek wil net kortliks sê dit is n baie lang pad van die klein dorpie,...

In this article I look mainly at the UK’s GDP position. While the ONS first estimate for Q1 2022 shows that it is now 0.6% higher than the pre-pandemic peak in Q3 of 2019, this is entirely down to increased government consumption and investment, mainly health-related. But for this real-terms increase, the economy (measured in GDP) would be some 2% smaller now, even before the cost-of-living crisis hits us fully, and before government and Bank of England tighten fiscal and monetary policy...

This article first appeared in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly on 19 March 2022. Russian Invasion of Ukraine The Russian invasion of Ukraine started on 24 February 2022. Since then, several thousand combatants from both sides and more than 500 Ukrainian civilians have died, bombs have ruined many cities, and more than two million Ukrainians, half of them children, left the country to become refugees. And the sweeping sanctions the West imposed on Russia in response not only...