Paul Buchanan speaks at the RTPI 2014 Planning Convention
Paul’s central argument is that economic growth is coming primarily from cities. We have been witnessing this trend for the last 50 years and it looks as if it will continue. The dominance of cities is increasing in population terms and even more so economically. The planning industry needs to be thinking about how they […]
Psychology, not hard line maths, tells us why Osborne’s strategy is working
So, International Monetary Fund, wrong again! At the end of last week, the IMF abandoned its criticism of the UK government’s economic strategy. Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, said her organisation had ‘underestimated’ the strength of the recovery in Britain. The IMF now believes that the UK will be the fastest growing of any major […]
Exciting times at the Office for National Statistics: the value of drugs and prostitution
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just increased the size of the British economy by nearly £10 billion, a figure equivalent to around 0.7 per cent of the economy as a whole. George Osborne has not waved a magic wand. We have not suddenly become more productive. The reason is that, for the first […]
Obama allies lead the way on a positive approach to climate change
The fracking debate continues apace, with the announcement by the British Geological Survey that there are over 4 billion barrels of oil in the shale rocks of the South of England. The government has proposed new rules of access to land in order to speed up the exploitation of this oil, with payments of £20,000 […]
Two cheers for the global recovery, but doubts remain in the Euro zone
Worries are growing about some of the countries in the Euro zone slipping back into double dip recession. By convention, a recession is when national output (GDP) has fallen for two successive quarters. But this is far from being news. In a substantial number of economies, output is lower than it was not just two […]
Forget the hype. Capitalism has made the world a more equal place
Metropolitan liberals love to be able to criticise Western society. Recently, their lives have been brightened by the extensive discussion on the rise in inequality since the 1970s, especially in the Anglo-Saxon economies. There is a danger that this essentially anti-capitalist narrative will come to dominate the media, paving the way for increased regulation and […]
A Different View of World Trade: Why National Accounts Can Be Exciting
Imagine that, for some reason, you were forced to choose between having to read a long, turgid novel like Westward Ho or Middlemarch, or a book on the methodology of the national economic accounts. Most people, however reluctantly, would plump for the former. But the latter can at times be very exciting. A recent paper […]
New ideas are needed in economics, but not the tired old statist ones
The annual Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) conference was held in Toronto earlier this month. INET was created by George Soros in the autumn of 2009 in response to the economic crisis. Mainstream economics bears a heavy responsibility for creating the intellectual climate prior to the crash that the problems of boom and bust […]
Bridget talks about North-East Growth on BBC Radio 4
Volterra’s senior partner Bridget Rosewell was recently interviewed for Martin Wainwrights series on BBC Radio 4 ‘The Myth of the North’. The programme considered how the stereotype that life is ‘grim’ in the north of England is vastly outdated, focusing on the region’s industry and culture in the 21st century. Bridget was interviewed in the […]
Supply-side growth, not inflation, is the cure to the debt overhang problem
In the year to March 2014, consumer prices in Sweden fell by 0.4 per cent. This has prompted the central bank, the Riksbank, to abandon the normally cautious language used by such institutions. Over the same period, inflation was negative in a further seven European countries, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain. In eight other […]
