London Councils – Volterra produces unemployment forecasts for the London labour market

Volterra was recently commissioned by London Councils to undertake a detailed piece of research on unemployed London residents and their future employment prospects. Essentially, the research establishes the unemployment picture across London historically, before analysing the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on unemployment in London. Several forecasting scenarios have also been laid out […]

Less austerity will always mean more tax

Austerity

There is a great deal of discussion, following the election, of relaxing or even abandoning austerity. There is an equal amount of confusion about this, because the same word is being used to describe two quite separate concepts. The consequences of the government changing its policy on austerity are dramatically different, depending on which one […]

Don’t fear robots taking your job – worry about them cutting your wages

Robot playing ping pong

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 […]

Claims that a low tax, low regulation UK would be a disaster are rubbish

President Hollande in the UK

Dame Minouche Shafik, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, is leaving to become Director of the London School of Economics.  Last weekend, she gave her final interview wearing her Bank hat. Shafik issued what was described in the media as a “thinly veiled warning” to the Chancellor, Phillip Hammond.  She stated that it was […]

The people of Burnley and Bradford have a point about the impact of immigration

The scenes as the migrant camp was cleared in Calais once again provoked bitter divisions in British society. Metropolitan luvvies and liberals tweeted their virtue and called for no restrictions on immigration. In more traditional areas, there is active resentment at the possibility of even further inflows of foreigners. When New Labour decided in the […]

Look to Twitter for why Britain’s economy proved Project Fear wrong

The economic data on post-Brexit Britain is beginning to emerge.  We discovered last month that employment in May to July grew by 174,000 compared to the previous three months.  Last week, the Office for National Statistics published its estimate for the output of the service sector of the economy in July.  This shows a 0.4 […]

Corbyn is completely out of touch with the real debate about UK austerity

Following the Brexit vote, normal service seems to have resumed. A key question in economic policy since the General Election of 2010 has moved centre stage once again: should the government abandon austerity? At one level, the question has an easy answer. Interest rates are now so low that the UK government can borrow for 30 […]

Why austerity must be the order of the day for May’s chancellor

On the face of it, the Brexiteers have a bit of explaining to do. A week before the vote, Boris Johnson dismissed fears about the value of sterling, and accused the governor of the Bank of England of “talking the economy down”. Yet the economy does seem to have stalled, property funds have had to […]

Is Britain on the edge of recession? History is an unreliable guide

Concerns are growing about a marked slowdown in the UK economy. The Lloyds Bank purchasing managers’ index, for example, fell to 52.1 in April, its lowest point since 2013. The initial estimate for GDP, total output, in the first quarter of this year shows an increase of just 0.4 per cent on the final quarter of 2015. […]

Could Ernie replace Andy? The Bank’s take on automation

The Chief Economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, has been in the news with his predictions that up to 15 million jobs in the UK are at risk of being lost to automation. This is a huge number, around half the total number of people in work today. Haldane injected a note of […]