Economist, Visiting Professor, Lecturer, Writer, Public Speaker.
This was the first Autumn Budget, and a bit like the climate one typically gets at this time of the year the economic outlook in it was a bit gloomy. Because of assumptions about lower productivity – in 16 of the last Budgets it has been forecast to return to its long-term rate of growth …
Latest figures show that UK productivity fell back in Q1 to the levels previously seen prior to the financial crisis in 2008. Quite frankly, it’s shocking to see that productivity hasn’t grown at all in almost a decade, and that we’re actually producing a bit less now per hour than we did then. The broad …
Continue reading “Productivity: the UK’s biggest economic challenge?”
Last week’s MPC committee witnessed the widest vote split since 2011, with three out of the eight economists on the MPC voting to increase interest rates by a quarter of a per cent. Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney voted against a rise, a position he defended in his Mansion House speech on Tuesday. A …