[Originally posted at LSE British Politics and Policy blog, 14/08/13] This week has brought a slew of news about the UK housing market. Industry commentators are telling us the sector has “turned a corner”: levels of market activity increased significantly in July alongside a sharp upturn in prices. […]
A bunch of statistics about the housing market have been published over the last few days. Housing issues have been hitting the headlines in the mainstream media harder than is usually the case. A number of the key pressure groups have made the point forceful that current developments […]
Mark Carney’s importation of the forward guidance approach has been all over the mainstream and social media. But how significant is the announcement that the Bank of England is planning on keeping nominal interest rates as they are until after the next General Election? The comment it has […]
Zero hours contracts are not new. But that doesn’t mean they’re not news. Today the BBC reports on a study by CIPD that suggests there are four times as many workers on zero-hours contracts than previously thought – a million rather than 250,000. Perhaps as important as the […]
In 1930 Keynes wrote his famous essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. In the essay he made a range of predictions about what the world would be like a hundred years hence. At the heart of the exercise was the impact of increasing productivity and rates of economic […]
Debates over the demarcation of different schools of economic thought are by no means new. Taxonomic disputes break out sporadically. Whether “mainstream”, “orthodox” and “neoclassical” economics ever have been, are, or could be synonymous is a question that has exercised several authors of a philosophical turn of mind. […]
The Ministry of Justice consultation Transforming Legal Aid closes today. At the last minute I decided to submit something reflecting on the economics of the proposals. You can find the substance of what I wrote on my page at Scribd.com. It can be accessed below the fold.
One of the central conclusions drawn from the Global Financial Crisis was that the UK economy was too dependent on financial services and unproductive investment in the property market rather than the real economy. So the economy needs rebalancing. One of the main issues facing the housing market […]
… the actions of economists today bear on the life chances of the world’s population far more substantially than do the actions of the members of most other professions. George DeMartino Replication is an activity that doesn’t attract enough attention, enough credit, or enough effort in the social […]
Making work pay. Few sensible people would object to this as a policy aspiration. It’s at the core of the Coalition Government’s justification for its reforms to the social security system. So that’s got to be good. The cracks begin to appear when we move on to consider […]
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