The Political Economy of Risk Taking – and how HS2 is Misunderstood
High Speed Rail has no shortage of enemies. It is challenged for having rising costs, too few benefits and for being the plaything of vested interests, such as local authorities and rail companies. These are often cheap shots, based on what sometimes appears to be a wilful misunderstanding of what HS2 is actually about, though […]
Airports, Commercial Value and how to Split Hairs
In the not too distant past, major UK airports were public assets. In many parts of the world, they still are. But here, for some good and some not so good economic reasons, we privatised ours. So now we need to ask whether private investors want to own them, and especially whether they want to construct […]
Macro-economic modelling and its uses
An International Macro Symposium conference this week hosted by the ESRC and the Oxford Martin School has brought home to me how little things have changed in some quarters. There is still a belief that with some tweaks the old modelling frameworks can capture the elements that were missing before the crisis, and a deeply […]
How bad is this recession?
A number of commentators have pointed out that this is the slowest recovery from recession in more than a hundred year. Taking output measures this is correct. But taking employment as the main measure of recession it is not. Both the 1980s and the 1990s saw much sharper job losses, while the 1970s recession saw […]
Transparency, Clarity and Understanding
The call for more transparency is a compelling one. We should have more information, more easily available. Stuff should not be hidden away. I am generally a believer in all of this, and that people have greater ability to absorb and critique than they are given credit for. But there are risks and caveats which […]
