Tag Archives: Trade Issues

The following article is based on my speech notes for a presentation to University College London’s Global Business School for Health on 22nd February 2022. The webinar was titled: Health Innovation through Capital and Private Equity Markets webinar. The question panellists were asked to address was this: “….whether capital and private equity markets are actually driving forward better and sustainable health innovation?” I argued that private capital and private equity markets – far from...

It looks as if the UK’s GDP will have risen by a little over 7% in 2021, after a fall now estimated at 9.4% in 2020. (We await the Q4 data).  It seems that – despite stronger November data – GDP in 2021 will come in below that of 2019, and maybe a tad less than 2018.  Clearly COVID has played a major part, but is there also evidence of Brexit-induced slowdown in the mix? The “Conservative Home” website (among so many other right-wing propaganda outlets) tries hard to keep spirits up and the...

In 2020, GDP per head of population fell, year on year, by a massive 10.5%. For me, that’s the  take-away statistic from last Friday’s GDP-related ‘data dump’ by ONS.  The level of GCDP per head (in real, inflation-adjusted terms) was £29,124.  This was almost identical to the level in 2009 (£29,098), at the peak of the global financial crisis, and otherwise the lowest on record since 2003.  Of course, the extent of the decline is heavily down to the government’s  first lockdown...

The following review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 6th January, 2021.  Trade Wars are Class Wars presents an eagle-eyed perspective on the global economy, underpinned by close analysis and a remarkable clarity of exposition. The book is a terrific survey of the forces behind today’s global trade tensions and imbalances – even if the authors ultimately fall short of defining an alternative system. Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis contend that trade wars – such as currently...

The predilection for More Trade I do not consider an increase in inter-country trade a good thing in and of itself, though that view is common among economists and in the media.  For most economists increased trade reflects a putative more efficient international allocation of resources derivative from competition on a global...

Macbeth:I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,And falls on th'other. . . .Boris Johnson is a moral (or is it amoral?) coward, dispenser of racist remarks, teller of untruths, and general political fantasist. Driven by ambition and lust for power, he appears to have no...

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...

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...

On Wednesday 29 November 2017, PRIME's director, Ann Pettifor, gave evidence at the Committee's invitation to the UK Parliament's Treasury Select Committee, together with Professor Jagjit Chadha, Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research and Paul Johnson, Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies. A verbatim report of the discussion can be found on the Select Committee's website here. Below we publish PRIME's written evidence to the Treasury Select Committee....

This article was first published on the Prospect magazine website on 15th October 2017“Strong and stable” seems of a world so far, far away.  The recent Daily Mail headline “PM slaps treacherous Chancellor down” portrays a government in political chaos. Thanks to open, unresolved intra-Brexiteer warfare, ministers are unable to agree the basics of how to exit the European Union. This state of uncertainty intensifies just as the risks to British jobs and living standards are...