Prime, Policy Research in Macroeconomics

A sound national economy is NOT a matter of bean-counting!  Image with thanks to pearlsofprofundity The Way It WasSince 2010 the ideology of balanced budgets has dominated economic policy debate in Britain, from the micro (public institutions such as NHS trusts) through to the macro (George Osborne’s...

I was looking at my Tweetdeck this morning when I came across this tweet from the Brookings Institution: Now it is clearly a Good Thing in principle for the US Federal government’s budget to be explained in clear and simple ways, but why – I asked myself – do Brookings choose to concentrate today on interest payments (which form just 6% of outlays)...

The “gold standard” for analysis of the economic policies of political parties was set by The Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), established by Jan Tinbergen, Nobel prize winner and, more substantial, member of the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II.  For decades before each election the CPB would assess the manifestos of all parties (see analytical review of the CPB).  Using its highly-respected and publicly available statistical model, CPB...

“Government debt should not be measured in pounds; it should be measured in GDPs. When GDP is high, so are tax revenues, and so is the ability of the government to repay.” Prof. Roger Farmer, NIESR, November, 2016 Three Facts about Debt and Deficits Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a review of political manifestos prepared for General Election 2017. Predictably, the respected, and largely independent IFS researchers review the tax and spending proposals of the...