Tag Archives: growth

In the last few months I have gotten accused of racism a few times at this blog. I don’t think I am misrepresenting my accusers by stating that their claim is based primarily because of my views on a) immigration and b) the differences between the economic performance of different countries. The two issues actually collapse into one. I have stated repeatedly that I believe that culture is a key factor affecting the difference in economic outcomes (and many...

It's not going to come from people working more. Excerpt from the IMF's latest Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece, just released: Oh dear. Quite apart from the negative contribution to growth, the prospect of unemployment taking 44 years to return to something approaching normality is simply appalling for Greece's population. I've looked in more detail at this here (Forbes).Well, if labour isn't going to drive growth, there's always investment, yes?Er, not really. The outlook for...

On March 16th, George Osborne unveiled his shiny new Budget. Full of populist tax giveaways to help "hard working people", it was the sort of budget that we might expect from a Chancellor riding the crest of an economic recovery. UK plc is growing well, profits are rising and the Board can afford to increase the dividend.But this is not the current economic situation. Far from an economic recovery gathering pace, the latest figures from the OBR show that UK plc is slowing. In its March 2016...

This, I would argue, is one of the scariest charts in the world today. The green line is output per hour worked, and the dotted green line is the pre-crisis trend: It’s what the Bank of England calls the “UK productivity puzzle.” As the BBC’s Linda Yueh notes: “output per hour is around 16 percentage points lower than it should be if productivity had grown at its pre-crisis pace.” I don’t think it should be called a “productivity puzzle”. That would imply that we don’t really understand the...