Tag Archives: GDP & Economic Activity

I’ve just been updating our data for GDP per head of population (from the OECD database plus adding the ONS estimate for 2018) and noticed a startling fact. The age of austerity, starting with the 2010 Coalition government, and on to the Cameron / May governments, has to date been the worst since records began for annual change in GDP per head . The average increase in GDP per head of population, from 2010 to 2018, inclusive is lower than the decade 2000 to 2009, i.e. the...

Ten years on from the full explosion of the Great Financial Crisis in autumn 2008, and Brexit lurking just round the corner…  A lot of the Brexit arguments revolve around the perceived pros and cons of the EU’s Single Market; meanwhile, President Trump has been using force majeure to overturn aspects of the 1994 NAFTA deal. Given this conjuncture, I thought it would be instructive to take stock and assess, over a longer time-frame, how the UK and other developed economies have...

The BoE’s decision to raise the Bank Rate to 0.75% is a mistake. It is a mistake comparable to those made by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the years between 2003 and 2006.  Mark Carney It is a mistake that must be understood in a wider context. Not just the political context – which promotes...

Over the past decade in advanced western economies, the rate of improvement in prosperity has ground to the lowest point of the post-war period.  Stagnation is now the norm across the majority of the globe, and even in Asia more substantial gains are slowing.This position is illustrated by the comprehensive productivity...

What Crisis?For the last several years the media have carried reports of a crisis of low productivity plaguing the British economy, both in terms of level and rate of change.  Almost two years ago, PRIME's Jeremy Smith provided what I considered the definitive refutation of the existence of such a crisis.  But, far from ending, the “crisis” discussion has gathered pace to become a recurrent media theme.A presentation of trends in UK productivity appeared in the Civil Service...

We know that the UK economy has remained in a rut, plagued by foolish austerity and declining real wages, since the great financial crisis.  We know too that the Eurozone suffered its own, largely self-imposed, economic stasis or decline – notably from 2010 to 2015, with unemployment over 10% till late last year.So I thought it could be interesting to look, in a simple way, at the performance of a set of mainly developed economies, in Europe plus a few from other parts of the...

Today's Observer newspaper (4th June), publishes a letter signed by 130 economists, under the heading "Labour’s manifesto proposals could be just what the economy needs".  We felt it important to reproduce the contents of the letter here, together with the full list of signatories (who include PRIME's directors Ann Pettifor and Jeremy Smith, and...

“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...