Britain’s debt dilemma: Not too high, not too low or the UK economy risks disaster
The Bank of England Financial Policy Committee (FPC) has signalled that it has become worried again about debt. Its specific focus is households.Consumer credit, for example, grew by 10 per cent during 2016, far faster than the economy as a whole. A lot of household debt is in the form of a mortgage, so there is […]
WEBs – can they be negative?
The second in our series of blogs looking at how Paul Buchanan has continued to develop the techniques and spread the application of WEBs. Can WEBs be negative? I spent many years after Crossrail espousing the power of WEBs: the economic growth that resulted, the additional tax revenues accruing to government and all of the […]
Anti-growth Welsh leaders are denying their voters prosperity by opposing shale
Leading Welsh politicians seem to be getting ideas above their station. Fifty years ago, Labour held all but four of the Parliamentary seats, and had over 60 per cent of the vote. Now, the Conservatives are by a large margin the second party in terms of votes, and are within hailing distance of Labour. They […]
The history of Wider Economic Benefits (WEBs)
Paul Buchanan started WEBs, secured the original approval of WEBs by government and has continued to develop the techniques and spread the application of WEBs ever since. This series of blogs looks at some of the key changes and innovations that were introduced over time. They range from the original work on Crossrail, through early […]
Don’t fear robots taking your job – worry about them cutting your wages
Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be in the news all the time, and breakthroughs are announced regularly. Last year, it was an AI programme which beat the world champion at Go, a game immensely more complex than chess. Now, in the austere American journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes […]
A planning crisis
Partly due to its success in attracting jobs and talent, demand for housing in London has outstripped supply and now home ownership is unaffordable for many households. In a well-functioning market, increases in house prices should incentivise large scale housing development. But this simply has not happened. So what is constraining housing development in the […]
There’s substance to the Trump team’s trade critique of Germany and the Eurozone
President Trump’s administration has made many criticisms of Germany. One of the more important was by his top trade advisor, Peter Nabarro. He accused the Germans of using a “grossly undervalued” Euro to “exploit” its trading relationship with America. The complaint that when the Euro was formed the Deutschmark was too low relative to the […]
How broken is our housing market?
Last month the government released its Housing White Paper ‘Fixing our Broken Housing Market’; the title is an ambitious promise. The industry response to the White Paper was fairly consistent: it was welcome movement in the right direction but it was too little too late. In short, the plans are not radical enough to solve […]
Need a reason to cut public sector pay and pensions? Look at Jeremy Corbyn
The shambles over the treatment of National Insurance has dominated the media’s reporting of the recent Budget. But only the previous week, Jeremy Corbyn made a complete horlicks of his tax return for the second year running. The Bearded One makes a saintly fuss over making his tax affairs transparent. In 2016, he forgot to […]
Kenneth Arrow proved economists needn’t be loud to make a difference
Does winning the Nobel Prize in economics cause longevity? We might be forgiven for thinking so. Thomas Schelling died last year aged 95. The author of the famous textbook, Paul Samuelson, passed away at 94, whilst his colleague, Bob Solow, is still going strong at 92. The British Laureate Ronald Coase reached the age of […]
