Economist, Visiting Professor, Lecturer, Writer, Public Speaker.
Fertility, longevity, migration, and age distribution are not just social statistics – they impact productivity, savings, inflation, and interest rates. In this article, I’d like to focus on what this means for the UK in the context of the third consecutive year of a decline in its fertility rate. This fell to 1.41% in 2024 …
Continue reading “The UK is ageing fast: the risks and benefits”
One of the oddities about the narrative on the direction of interest rates is the argument that, because consumer price inflation is still above the 2% target, the Bank of England cannot cut interest rates. That suggests that interest rate policy changes immediately impact the current inflation rate in the short term. However, this view …
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?”