Over the past 15 years, productivity growth in advanced economies has significantly slowed, giving rise to the productivity paradox of the New Digital Economy – that is, the notion of increased business spending on information and communication technology assets and digital services without a noticeable increase in productivity. We argue that time lags are the most important reason for the slow emergence

Modern economic theory gives an important role to expectations as an influence on outcomes. This paper reviews evidence on how well measures of expectations conform to outcomes. It confirms earlier results that measures taken from financial markets perform poorly as predictors of outcomes. Looking at the individual responses to the Confederation of British Industry’s Industrial Trends Survey, it does

Across the United Kingdom public (and private) resources have been targeted on improving broadband infrastructure. While this has served to provide new opportunities for households and firms, there has been some debate around the ability of firms to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise through this evolving infrastructure. In this respect, there has been particular debate on how far

This paper examines the implications for regional policy of new research on the role played by a failure in the ‘capacity to aspire’ [Appadurai, A. (2004), ‘The capacity to aspire’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds), Culture and Public Action, Washington, DC: World Bank.] in perpetuating disadvantage traps. After a brief review of the magnitude of the challenge that regional policy needs to confront

This article assesses whether economic injustices that took place in the past still have significant implications for the material welfare of people many years later. That issue is central to the question of how fair is the distribution of wealth and income today. It is also relevant to issues of reparations for past wrongs. I find that in standard neoclassical models of economic growth the lingering

This paper describes how the large budget deficits of 2020 in the United States and the United Kingdom were financed, how central banks are in practice managed not just short-term interest rates but also yields on government bonds, and how their ability to resist a post-coronavirus surge in inflation has been compromised.

Much of public policy-making has in recent decades been driven by the idea of evidence-based policy – policy rooted in the principles of social science and, more specifically, empirical validation based on social and behavioural science. This article argues that evidence-based policy, while helping to improve the design of policies aimed at changing individual behaviour, lacks a recognition that individual

We propose a nowcasting system to obtain real-time predictive intervals for the first-release of UK quarterly GDP growth that can be implemented in a menu-driven econometric software. We design a bottom-up approach: forecasts for GDP components (from the output and the expenditure approaches) are inputs into the computation of probabilistic forecasts for GDP growth. For each GDP component considered

The UK faces a number of economic challenges in the short to medium term. Prior to COVID-19, renegotiation of trading arrangements with the European Union was the most prominent of these. We build on existing macroeconomic analysis by assessing prospects for the UK’s regions generated by combining a global macroeconometric model and a regional computable general equilibrium of the UK. A central macroeconomic

Policymakers need to know if the structure of competition and the degree of banking market concentration change the incidence of financial crises. Previous studies have not always come to clear conclusions. We use a new dataset of 19 countries where we include capital adequacy and house price growth as factors affecting crisis incidence, and we find a positive role for bank concentration in reducing

I assess a novel rule that was introduced in the UK in 2015. It gave the British government fiscal flexibility whenever GDP growth warranted it. This rule lasted just a year, but it had features worth exploring. I apply solution methods for models with occasionally-binding constraints to assess the demand stabilisation properties of state-contingent fiscal rules. First it is shown that fiscal flexibility

Under the Trump administration, a transatlantic trade conflict has been escalating step by step. First, it was about tariffs on steel and aluminium, then about retaliation for the French digital tax, which is suspended until the end of the year. Most recently, the US administration threatened the European Union with tariffs on cars and car parts because of Canadian seafood being subject to lower import

This paper explores the nature and scale of inter-regional and inter-urban inequalities in the UK in the context of international comparisons and our aim is to identify the extent to which such inequalities are associated with strong national economic performance. In order to do this, we first discuss the evolution of UK interregional inequalities relative to comparator European economies over more

We use microsimulation combined with a model of the COVID-19 impacts on individuals and households to obtain projections of households in destitution in the United Kingdom. The projections are estimated at two levels: aggregate quarterly for the UK, for all quarters of 2020; and annual for 2020 differentiated by region, sector and household demographics. At the aggregate level, destitution is projected

We investigate economic resilience of UK regions before, during and after the 2007/8 global financial crisis. We date business cycle turning points in real output, employment and productivity to assess the resilience dimensions of resistance, recovery and renewal and rank the economic resilience of regions in a resilience scorecard. Our empirical results reveal that the business cycle in productivity

This paper analyses the costs and benefits of lockdown policies in the face of COVID-19. What matters for people is the quality and length of lives and one should measure costs and benefits in terms of those things. That raises difficulties in measurement, particularly in valuing potential lives saved. We draw upon guidelines used in the UK for public health decisions, as well as other measures, which

There is renewed interest in levelling up the regions of the UK. The combination of social and political discontent, and the sluggishness of key UK macroeconomic indicators like productivity growth, has led to increased interest in understanding the regional economies of the UK. In turn, this has led to more investment in economic statistics. Specifically, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently

This article first introduces the concept, the rationale, the causes and the genesis of global value chains from a worldwide perspective in the form of a brief overview In the second empirical section, a closer look is taken at the intermediate trade integration in the EU In particular, the employment effects of the intermediate trade connections for each EU member state and for selected sectors are

With international trade increasingly undertaken within vertically fragmented supply chains, this paper considers the impact of changes in trade costs on domestic output. In the context of the UK’s exit from the EU we show that the negative impact on UK output will depend on changes in both domestic and export competitiveness. Since for many firms the majority of their sales are to the domestic market

We estimate trend UK labour productivity grow thusing a Hodrick-Prescott filter method. We use the results to compare downturns where the economy fell below its pre-existing trend. We find that the current productivity slowdown has resulted in productivity being 19.7% below the pre-2008 trend path in 2018. This is nearly double the previous worst productivity short fall ten years after the start of

*All questions and comments related to the forecast and its underlying assumptions should be addressed to Iana Liadze (i.liadze@niesr.ac.uk). We would like to thank Jagjit Chadha and Garry Young for helpful comments and Patricia Sanchez Juanino for preparing the charts and compiling the database underlying the forecast. The forecast was completed on 24 January 2020. Exchange rate, interest rate and

Carbon pricing has been the most prominent climate change mitigation policy for the EU since the launch of its emissions trading system (ETS) in 2005. Since then, the context of international climate policy as well as of the socio-political and economical context of decarbonisation has changed considerably. The 2015 Paris Agreement engages virtually every country unlike its predecessor, while non-carbon

This study uses an econometric approach to investigate the role of IPR protection on renewable energy adoption using panel data of 102 countries at five-year intervals over the period 1990–2005. The Ginarte-Park index is used as a measure of the strength of intellectual property protection while the adoption of renewable energy is measured by the share of renewable energy in total final energy use

There is evidence that the risk of stranded assets in the oil and gas sector is underpriced in financial markets. Publicly traded Western oil and gas companies are starting to write down assets, opening up the possibility that more rationalisation of value is likely to come. To the extent that large oil companies diversify portfolios to include cleaner energy and carbon sequestration technologies,

The production of this forecast is supported by the Institute's Corporate Members: Bank of England, HM Treasury, Mizuho Research Institute Ltd, Office for National Statistics, Santander (UK) plc and by the members of the NiGEM users group.

Executive SummaryThe UK economy faces more than usually uncertain times. Outside the European Union, and in an increasingly challenging global environment characterised by ageing populations, clima...

Executive SummaryAfter Brexit, the UK must show that it has a voice. It will need to re-earn international respect, and in particular establish the concept of a ‘global Britain’ on the basis of per...

Executive SummaryThe need to decarbonise the economy in order to slow the pace of climate change is now recognised as one of the most pressing international policy challenges. While the UK cannot b...

Executive SummaryAlongside the challenge of maintaining economic competitiveness in the face of great uncertainty, Brexit brings an opportunity for the government to set out a new industrial strate...

Executive SummaryEconomic policymaking in the UK has historically focussed more on the demand side than on the supply side of the economy. Yet it is on the supply side – the way in which an economy...

Executive SummaryThreats to the security of the UK are evolving with the changing nature of conflict and balance of power in the world. They are multiple and fragmented, and domestic and online as ...

Executive SummaryDiscussion of the UK's housing crisis is of long date, and tends to focus on a simple story about a mismatch in housing supply and demand and the consequent need to build more home...

Executive SummaryServices are simultaneously the most important sector of the UK economy and the sector facing the biggest challenge as a result of Brexit. The prospective departure from the Europe...

Recent studies have shown a strong link between the complexity of economies and their economic development. There remain gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these links, in par...