Brown, gold and mismanaging Britain’s Assets – Freethinking Economist
People who snipe at Brown for failing to sell gold should look to the far larger error he inherited| Freethinking Economist
People who snipe at Brown for failing to sell gold should look to the far larger error he inherited| Freethinking Economist
It is something of a cliche to argue that Britain is running out of money, living beyond its means, wandering through a fiscal fool’s paradise – but no less true for that. The trend of …| Freethinking Economist
Imagine that, having committed some unspeakable acts in a former life, you were asked in this one to deliver a verdict on whether the Spending Review was good or bad for UK Growth. What would be yo…| Freethinking Economist
A month ago I whiled away a lunch break asking BlueSky for the origin of a massive number. The figure £45bn had acquired a kind of solidity-by-repetition in what we pretentious types call “the political discourse”. £45bn was meant to be how much the government might save if it were to replace “manual, paper-based andContinue reading "The hunt for the £45bn"| Freethinking Economist
I wrote hurriedly last week about how US growth outperformance cannot all be explained by tech. Here is an even more hurried analysis using KLEMS data to dive into some of the decompositions of growth between UK and US. [A decomposition, in very crude terms: we know that output can be expressed as a functionContinue reading "Quick note on the US beating the UK at growth"| Freethinking Economist
It is a cliche of the policy-commentariat to point, laughing, at the number of Growth Plans to have sprung from the Government this century, and how badly correleated this is to success at their subject matter. The 2000s had the Five Drivers of Productivity (discussed here) – Investment, Skills, Innovation, Enterprise, and Competition. In 2010Continue reading "Why *should* growth be any better under Labour?"| Freethinking Economist
A long while ago I found myself in a lecture theatre listening to a speaker arguing that lowering drug prices was a foolish policy objective. When it comes to industrial strategy, what companies need are high margins! After all, this is how you get a high quantity of gross value added, and accumulating GVA isContinue reading "Innovation, Competition, and Pitfalls of the Sector method"| Freethinking Economist
Here is how it goes. Let’s say it starts with the Government doing something bad, like raise a tax by £20bn, to fund a bunch of stuff. People don’t like tax, according to science, and s…| Freethinking Economist
In Downing Street, I was once lobbied to support a £200m per annum cut to beer duty, because it was “the best growth policy I could ask for”. You see, that £200m would go into drinkers&…| Freethinking Economist
Failure brings some benefits. UK growth and productivity performance over the past 15 years has been *so* dire that its economy, formerly facing the challenge of being at the Frontier, is instead i…| Freethinking Economist
One of the natural reactions to learning that Labour has a mission to grow the economy is to sneer. Every government wants to grow the economy! Most Budgets announce themselves as being a Budget fo…| Freethinking Economist
There is a black hole, we are told. A yawning one, that needs to be filled in, oooh, around 10 days from now, or we face some unmentionable doom. Fortunately, after a brief flirtation with Rule by …| Freethinking Economist
