Prime, Policy Research in Macroeconomics

Much of the debate over Brexit focuses on narrowly on trade in goods.  In that debate one finds relatively little discussion of the performance of the EU internal market with regard to commodity trade (“goods”). The typical argument for the British government  negotiating a post-Brexit agreement presumes that EU internal market...

“Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money”Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugural address, 4 March 19331.     Introduction and overviewTen years ago the bursting of private debt ‘bubbles’ – most obviously in the US, UK and on the periphery of the EU – woke policymakers to the importance of...

Severe as it has been for the welfare of the British people, eight years of so-called austerity under three Conservative governments are but the most recent manifestation of Tory assaults on public services.  Since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister almost forty years ago, contracting the public sector has been a constant theme across Tory governments.Chart 1 shows total pubic spending as share of GDP over four decades, 1980-2017.  In the first three years of the Thatcher...

Ten years ago the judgement and competence of the economics profession was politely questioned by the Queen of England and thereafter fiercely attacked by civil society and ‘heterodox’ economists. Through all this, the profession has stood aloof - from both the heated debate, and indeed from much of the crisis itself. No...

This week a friend casually explained that he and his wife considered having a second child. But having recently moved into a new house, they were having to fork out a large share of their income on mortgage interest payments. Hearing talk of potential rate rises had therefore persuaded them not to risk another pregnancy.Such are the life-changing impacts of decisions (or non-decisions) made by a group of men (and one woman) on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank...

Ann Pettifor reviews The Everyday Economy by Rachel Reeves MP.“For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ’tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse…and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.”  - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.At the launch last week of The Everyday Economy Rachel Reeves MP introduced her new short...

The policy prescriptions of the 5 Star Movement can be found in two main documents, published in 2012 and 2013. The most important is that of 27 December 2012, insofar as it has been posted on the website of the leader of the Movement, Mr. Grillo and, for this reason, it can be conceived as the official programme of the Movement. In general terms, one can observe that this document mainly focuses on environmental issues, while relatively little attention is devoted to purely...

With acknowledgement to AgauNEWS Britain is led today by deeply divided political parties. Our leaders have many policies, but no inspiring vision for Britain’s future – either within, or outside the EU. As President Roosevelt once famously said: “where there is no vision, the people perish”.The peoples...

On 5th January 2018, Professor John Weeks gave this year's David Gordon Memorial Lectureat the meeting of the American Economic Association in Philadelphia, USA.  It was hosted by the Union for Radical Political Economics, and we are pleased to publish the text of the lecture, below.  It can also be downloaded as a pdf here.  David Gordon was an American economist who inter alia founded the Institute for Labor Education and Research in 1975, and later the Schwartz Center for...

In an article for the Guardian, published on Saturday, 27 January, 2018, PRIME's director drew a parallel between the Bitcoin bubble and the inflated London property market. She argued that "vast sums of money have been poured into finite supplies of bitcoins and London property. Both have consequently exploded in value, albeit over different time periods. And so both have become financialised assets that deliver capital gains far in excess of people’s ability to earn income...