Tag Archives: unemployment

Austerity v Growth: A False Dichotomy

Posted on February 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

Politicians’ commentary on the state of the UK economy remains frustratingly tendentious and unsophisticated. The rhetoric of both the “austerity”  and “growth” camps is overly simplified and needlessly polarized. Action is needed to stimulate growth. However, this fact doesn’t necessitate adding to the debt burden. The economics of the fiscal multiplier implies greater concern should be given to the composition of spending cuts and tax rises. By designing our austerity strategy to reallocate resources to “high multiplier” activities, growth can be initiated during fiscal consolidation. Elucidating this common ground between the camps is required to move the debate forward and set the stage for the development of a credible and equitable austerity strategy.

Recession? Depression?

More than two years since the UK entered recession, the much anticipated recovery is yet to make its appearance. This week the ONS confirmed that the economy contracted by 0.2% in the last quarter of 2011, a consequence of chronically weak business investment and manufacturing. GDP remains almost 4% below pre-crisis peak. Comparing the current recovery to those following past recessions is chilling. The graph below, taken from Jonathan Portes’ blog, shows that output has already been depressed for longer than that experienced during the Great Depression, and looks set to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The current malaise is the product of weak demand, causing the economy to operate approximately 3% below its potential, and of reduced potential supply. Households and the government are set on consolidating their balance sheets and the Eurozone crisis has effectively foreclosed an export led recovery. There is thus little incentive for investment. The latest negative growth figures therefore come as no surprise.

Ongoing weak demand and reductions in supply capacity are linked, a phenomenon economists call “hysteresis”. If demand for a firm’s output is depressed for a prolonged period, machinery is scrapped and planned investments go unimplemented. Workplace skills and the likelihood of returning to work altogether decline in the length of an unemployment spell, reducing the stock of “human capital” in the economy. Not only has unemployment continued to rise in the UK, but it is increasingly long term and concentrated among the young. Youth unemployment has especially pernicious consequences, affecting the individual and economy for far longer than the spell of joblessness itself. Those experiencing spells of unemployment while young face significant wage penalties and a higher risk of future joblessness compared to their peers for decades, even after controlling for a wide array of individual and family characteristics (see, for example, Gregg and Tominey (2005) and Mroz and Savage (2006)). Thus, the fact that 18% of 16-24year olds are ‘NEETs’ (Not in Employment, Education or Training) should be sending alarm bells ringing through Whitehall. Their current idleness is not just an awful waste of their talents at this particular moment but makes it more likely for them to become trapped in dead-end areas of the labour market for much of their adult life. This is unfair, they did not choose to be born at a time dictating they join the workforce during the worst post-war recession, as well as being highly damaging to the wider economy.

Poor growth prospects ultimately make it harder to finance those dreaded debts. Low economic activity implies lower tax revenues, acting to undermine the UK’s fiscal credibility. In November, the OBR announced that £15bn of tightening is required in addition to what was initially anticipated to meet the deficit reduction targets. Moody’s, the rating agency, put the UK’s AAA credit rating on negative outlook, citing weak growth prospects and Eurozone exposure as justification.

Austerity v. Growth: A False Dichotomy

It seems like an impossible situation. Low growth undermines our fiscal credibility but, so we are told, raising government spending is off the cards as it will add to the national debt, spooking the markets, creating financial turmoil. With both austerity and growth strategies, it seems to be a case of damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

However, all is not lost. First, the downside risks of slowing the pace of fiscal consolidation are overblown and small relative to the costs of continued deficient demand but, leaving this to one side, the situation is not as hopeless as presented. We are not, in fact, faced with the choice of austerity or growth. This dichotomy is false and damaging. Rather than seeing this as a one-or-the-other problem, we should focus on the design of austerity strategy and how fiscal consolidation can be achieved with the lowest impact on growth and demand. It isn’t just a case of “tighten or not” but also “how to tighten”. By reallocating government resources to activities with a high fiscal multiplier, growth can be supported while the budget deficit is reduced. Enacting this principle also implies equitable policy reforms, dictating a transfer of resources from the richest to the poorest in society.

The Fiscal Multiplier

The fiscal multiplier gives the impact that changes in government spending have on overall demand in the economy. With a multiplier of 1, an extra pound of government spending raises total demand in the economy just by a pound. However, we generally expect the size of the multiplier to be greater than 1. Imagine government spending is increased by 1. This additional £1 then represents income which is spent. Let households spend a fraction c of their income. c is defined as the “marginal propensity to consume”. This extra c of spending then represents income for someone else…..who spends c of it….and so on. Thus, one can think of the total increase in demand leading from the £1 of government spending as

1 + c + c2 + c3 + …

Therefore, there can be a more than proportionate increase in demand with increase in government spending.

The actual size of fiscal multipliers is difficult to measure but a moment’s thought suggests they will vary across government activities. Resources should be shifted to high multiplier activities and the burden of cuts should be disproportionately concentrated on those with low propensities to consume. Imagine a balanced budget policy, taking income from one group and transferring it to another. Although fiscally neutral, the policy will boost growth if spending rises by more among the recipients than it falls among the funders. This will be the case if the marginal propensity to consume is higher among the recipients. By redesigning our austerity strategy to shift resources to high multiplier groups and activities, growth can be stimulated without a need to increase the debt burden.

What could this look like?

The analysis above suggests that cuts should be targeted at those with a low marginal propensity to consume, while those with higher MPCs should be protected. We shall also see that enacting this thinking implies equitable policy changes, dictating transfers of wealth to low income groups in society.

Exploiting variation in fiscal multipliers lies behind the Social Market Foundation’s suggestion of cutting high rate income tax relief on pension savings and capping ISA contributions. Such a policy would extract more tax revenue from those in a relatively secure financial position, who are better able to smooth the impact of cuts and tax rises, thereby minimising the impact of consolidation on overall demand. The SMF calculates that halving higher rate tax relief on pension contributions would save £6.7bn annually, while an ISA cap of £15,000 would generate an additional £1bn each year. Tightening should also be done through greater targeting of benefits rather than a reduction in their general level. Families at the bottom of the income distribution, without a savings safety net, are likely to have much higher marginal propensities to consume. Their income levels should thus be protected as far as possible on efficiency, as well as equity, grounds. Therefore, greater means testing of benefits should be enacted. Making child benefit and subsidies such as winter fuel payments and bus passes only available to the most disadvantaged in society will save huge sums but protect those who need it most.

Funds from savings created by efficient, equitable redesigns of the welfare system should be used to instigate a public works programme to facilitate a transition to a new industrial economy and restore the productive capacity of the economy. There are plenty of private sector projects in the pipeline that could be quickly undertaken given government funding. For example, as mentioned by Gerald Holtham, there is a private consortium willing to build the Severn barrage, a multi-billion pound scheme to supply 5 per cent of the UK’s electricity needs, given some guarantee on electricity prices. Investment spending could be rapidly deployed on schemes such as toll roads, that produce a revenue stream, and to support the UK’s broken housing market. We face a chronic shortage of housing in this country. The number of people waiting for social housing rose by 4.5% in 2010/2011, with 1.84million on the list in April 2011. Supporting investment in the housing stock would have huge social value and give a boost to the construction industry.

Further, funds could provide an initial capital injection to a small business bank or increase the scale of the coalition’s green investment bank. A new small business bank could make use of existing agencies to allocate and dispense the loans, offering them to small businesses at low rates, potentially concentrating funds in areas of especially afflicted by unemployment. The focus on small businesses should prove especially affective at job creation given research funded by the Kauffman Foundation showing that all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old.

A middle ground exists

We need to move beyond the unnecessarily polarised austerity-growth debate. Casting these aims as mutually exclusive is misleading and unhelpful, contributing to policy inertia and unnecessarily limiting debate on how we achieve fiscal consolidation. Action must be taken to improve the UK’s growth prospects. The fact that we simultaneously want to get the public finances under control does not imply nothing can be done. The government’s hands are not fully tied, it must use them.

Leave a comment

Posted in Fiscal Policy, UK Current Affairs, UK Economy, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , ,

To Be or Not To Be?

Posted on December 31, 2011 | 10 comments

European leaders face an acute existential migraine this New Year. If only AlcaSeltzer could help them.  

Gone are the days when “greek spread” referred primarily to tzatiki and taramasalata. The eurozone crisis is now generally regarded as a problem with a solution “technically and politically beyond reach”. The evidence certainly supports this dour viewpoint. Fifteen summits, seven changes of government and five master plans later, we are left with precisely zero in terms of substantive achievements. €457bn of European government debt must be refinanced by April, thus few grains remain in the hourglass. In the near term, ‘now’ in other words, European governments’ must acknowledge that contractionary fiscal policy is, yes, contractionary and revise the quack medicine of austerity that is currently prescribed to assuage our economic ills. In the longer term, the failure of the neoliberal underpinnings to the Euro must be acknowledged and institutions redesigned accordingly….if democratic support for a fiscal union is forthcoming.

What started as “the Greek problem” is now a fully fledged “Europe” problem. The credit rating of the entire European Union, not simply those of the pesky PIGS, is under threat of downgrade. Output and employment remain depressed. August witnessed the largest monthly decrease in eurozone industrial production since 2009 and many are predicting a slide back into recession in 2012. Unemployment in the region has soared to a new euro-era high, reaching 10.3% of the labour force in October. Joblessness has remained highest in Spain, where a staggering 22.8% (!!!) of workers are without jobs.

Rebalancing, not retribution, required

The strategies currently pursued by Eurozone institutions either do not go far enough or are opposite to what is required. Further, faster fiscal tightening continues to be dictated. Only yesterday, Spain announced plans to cut €8.9bn from public spending in 2012. Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics, described austerity in the current climate as a “snake” within the wider metaphor of the game “Snakes and Ladders”. It is getting us further from where we want to be.

Austerity continues to be prescribed because fiscal profligacy is too highly stressed as an underlying cause of the debt crisis. Inexcusably poor financial discipline, in part a consequence of the moral hazard generated by Euro membership (see previous post), clearly played a role in the Greek debacle, however, fundamental imbalances in competitiveness across the Eurozone cannot be ignored as a salient causal factor.

The health of government finances pre-crisis provided little clue as to which countries would be sucked into economic chaos. As Martin Wolf notes, “fiscal deficits were useless as indicators of looming crises”.  Trade imbalances, on the other hand, correctly identify the countries at the heart of the problem. Estonia, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy had the largest trade deficits over the period 1999-2007. A trade deficit occurs when the value of what a country imports exceeds that of its exports. In contrast to these tales of woe, Germany has experienced an increase in its trade surplus since 1999. The asymmetries in competitiveness and economic strength between Germany and the ‘peripheral’ states really are stark. Joblessness in Germany has been falling for the last 2 years and the financial market turbulence that is wreaking havoc in many European countries is said to have had “little impact” on the country’s economy. In Europe it really isn’t a case of ‘all in it together’.

It is an accounting identity that a country with a trade deficit must be a net borrower in order to fund that deficit. Within the Eurozone, surpluses in Germany and the Netherlands were previously channeled through the financial system to fund deficits in others, i.e. Greece Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The credit crunch caused these channels to seize up, eliminating this flow of funds, and also initiated a collapse in private borrowing, prompting government deficits to go through the roof.

Acknowledging that deep rooted differences in productivity and competitiveness have played a role in the crisis, leads one to the conclusion that reforms cannot simply be piled on debtor countries. Retributive justice, in the form of harsh spending cuts, is misapplied as reckless profligacy has had but a minor role to play. Rather, shifts in external balances across the eurozone are called for. As one country’s trade deficit is another’s surplus, this calls for adjustment and transfers on the part of surplus countries such as Germany. It is reckless to hold deficit countries to pro-cyclical austerity without countervailing measures to boost import demand elsewhere in Europe. In the absence of demand and credit expansion in healthy eurozone nations, fiscal tightening will continue to have the same impact that it has had up to now: to prolong and intensify the downturn.

Furthermore, not only does ‘more austerity’ inadequately deal with the root causes of the crisis, it is also aggravating our woes and is thus ultimately self-defeating. The Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift” is relevant here. To reduce the size of a budget deficit, a government must increase the size of tax receipts relative to its spending. Governments’ have focused their energies on fashioning large reductions in government spending as opposed to playing around with tax receipts. Public sector layoffs and pay freezes, cuts to departmental budgets and welfare bills are thus the name of the day. However, such coordinated, fierce austerity across the Eurozone is hampering growth and recovery, reducing tax revenues by more than the cuts in spending. Thus, paradoxically, the current austerity measures are ultimately making it harder for governments to repay those dreaded debts .

Eurozone countries are facing an even harder time of it than the UK as, for these countries, there is no exchange rate mechanism through which austerity and low domestic demand can boost exports to their main trading partners. Further, as implied above, credit and demand expansion among creditor nations has not been sufficiently boosted to provide any countervailing force to the cuts made in the peripheral countries.

ECB to the rescue?

In short, the fiscal policy of eurozone countries is a disaster zone: off target and self-defeating. What of monetary policy, that concerned with interest rates and money supply? The ECB has raised its game in the last few weeks but, by only offering credit to commercial banks, has not done enough to pull Europe back from the brink. Basic interest rates have been lowered to 1% and unlimited cash offered to commercial banks for up to three years. These actions will help to alleviate short term liquidity problems in the banking system but will not have any noticeable impact on the real economy or the debt crisis. Banks are adding this additional cheap funding to their capital buffers, compensating for the losses they face on their holdings of government bonds and household mortgages. Therefore, very little of this additional cheap capital is being devoted to easing the funding pressures on households, firms and their governments.

The hope was that, despite only offering credit to commercial banks, these banks would in turn buy the bonds of European governments, thereby easing the sovereign funding crisis. This has failed to occur as commercial banks are unwilling to purchase further government debt. The European Banking Authority recently announced that European banks still need to raise €115billion in additional capital to offset the falling value of government bonds they currently hold. Unsurprisingly, it is the Spanish, Greek and Italian banks with the biggest capital shortfalls. Thus, the banks in the most financially fragile countries are likely to go to their governments for assistance rather than with fresh funds. The ECB’s current actions are thus unlikely to do much to ease the debt crisis: banks are still turning to governments to bail them out, rather than the banks bailing out the governments as was hoped.

Sideshow Summit

The last Europe wide effort to produce a grand plan was, sadly, another grand waste of time. It was attention grabbing for the wrong reasons, bringing the continent no closer to a workable resolution. The fallout between the UK and its European peers may have some unpalatable consequences for us but is really a minor pothole in the road to Eurozone recovery. David Cameron’s actions did nothing positive to protect the City, it will now be harder for EU rules to be negotiated in our favour, and served to marginalise us within the European Union.

However, Mr Cameron’s mistakes are a mere sideshow. Of much greater importance was the failure of European leaders to acknowledge the arguments above that imply the need for reform that is balanced across creditor and debtor nations. Rather tougher controls on budget deficits, written into individual country constitutions, were focused on, with no countervailing measures to boost demand and credit availability at the eurozone core. It was agreed there is to be no fiscal union, only greater fiscal discipline. Therefore, Europe remains decidedly doomed. This summit got leaders no nearer to a credible cure to the continent’s troubles.

A New Year’s Resolution?

A tourniquet must be quickly applied, and life support machine turned on, to prevent the death of the Euro. Leaders must immediately acknowledge that further harsh austerity is wrongly targeted and self-defeating. The focus must be on growth and reducing unemployment. Public sector layoffs must be put on hold and tightening strategies rebalanced to put more weight on tax rises. Effort should be focused on designing a stabilisation strategy that expands import demand and credit supply among those eurozone countries that can afford it, i.e. Germany and the Netherlands.

More fundamentally, the failure of the neoliberal underpinnings to the Euro must be acknowledged. The existence of pervasive market imperfections implies the need to transform the design of eurozone institutions, promote greater fiscal integration and change the role and mandate of the ECB. A single currency eliminates a number of stabilisation mechanisms for individual economies, creating the need for much larger wage and price movements to prevent recessions, especially given that labour and capital are far from perfectly mobile (see my previous post). In this imperfect world, fiscal union is the essential counterpart to a monetary union. Fiscal transfers can then provide a counter-cyclical mechanism to support regional economies in tough times. This is what occurs in the United States, with Virginia playing the role of Greece.

Further, the ECB’s role and mandate must be reviewed. The ECB is not simply independent of European governments, as the Bank of England is to our own, but is ‘detached’. There is full separation of central bank and government finances, with the ECB legally forbidden from buying large amounts of government debt. This again reflects the euro’s neoliberal birthright, subordinating fiscal policy and the role of the state to the market. The neoliberal school of thought sees the sole role of central banks as inflation control. In the future the ECB must be mandated to target wider aggregates than just inflation, unemployment a key indicator. Further, the full detachment of the ECB from the governments it is supposed to serve must end. One potential institutional solution is given by Thomas Palley, who suggests the creation of a European Finance Authority that issues collective Eurozone debt on behalf of member governments which the ECB could then buy.

However, it must be noted that closer European fiscal integration requires the mandate of European citizens. In the short term, the advantages of installing technocrats and making executive decisions outweigh the cost of temporary infringement of democratic rights. However, these rights must not be continually subordinated, especially when it comes to thinking about the future of Europe more generally. It is far from clear that the necessary support for a more integrated Europe is there. Populist parties are increasingly sceptical of the Europe project and extremist politics appears to be making a comeback in a number of nations.

I remain sceptical that there is sufficient support for the extent of fiscal integration required to sustain the Euro. In my opinion, a common European identity is insufficiently forthcoming to motivate popular support for a United States of Europe, especially given the build up of anti-Europe and anti-Germany sentiment currently occurring. The unbalanced prescription of austerity and the stark asymmetries in adjustment pain across the continent is fuelling resentment and riots. Without adjustment by creditor nations who have benefited enormously from Euro membership, unemployment will continue to rise and times toughen in peripheral countries. Without a fiscal union to accompany the monetary union, wage falls and large variation in growth will continue to be the norm. This is a far from ideal backdrop to popular debates on the future of Europe.

In conclusion, we end 2011 with no end in sight to the eurozone debt crisis. Proposed solutions will continue to be off target and inadequate so long as fiscal mismanagement is stressed as the root cause of our woes. Although the consequences of a eurozone break-up will surely be enormously damaging, so too is the continued, futile application of austerity. Especially given that, if leaders continue in 2012 as they have done up to now, a disorderly disintegration looks inevitable. Happy New Year!

10 Comments

Posted in Debt Crisis, Eurozone, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , ,

Desperately Seeking Stimulus

Posted on September 20, 2011 | 3 comments

Plan B is for Bankruptcy? Bullshit. Bold, government backed programmes are needed to kick-start the economy and stem the jobs crisis.

No, we are not out of the woods. The green shoots of recovery still remain smothered by a thick layer of mud. UK unemployment rose to 2.51million people in July. That’s 7.9% of the workforce. A fifth of UK youths are now jobless. These dismal figures are a consequence of hefty falls in public sector employment and pathetic rates of private sector job creation, much lower than that expected by the Treasury and OBR. Furthermore, the UK ranked a pitiful 25th out of 27 countries for growth over the past year, only Romania and Portugal did worse. The Institute for Fiscal Studies shovels more gloom into the mix with the news that median net household income suffered its largest one-year drop since 1981 in the last financial year, battered by the real falls in earnings, benefits and tax credits.

These are not transient troubles. Martin Weale and co authors estimate that the current recession will be the longest since the war, highly likely to lead to a greater cumulative loss of value than the Great Depression. Martin Wolf in the FT argues that it is probable for the depression to last 72 months, making it 50% longer than its longest predecessor in a century. Furthermore, the singular focus on austerity across Europe will act to black out any light at the end of the tunnel. Cameron’s description of the current figures as “disappointing” is, therefore, a gross understatement.

You would think that the continued flow of feeble figures would trigger a revaluation of the current macroeconomic strategy. But no, “Plan B is for BANKRUPTCY” we are told, “The UK will be able to ‘weather the storm’”. Little convincing evidence has been supplied to support these claims. Despite all signals pointing towards a need for change, Osborne insists that no amendments will be made to Britain’s deficit reduction programme. Although Britain does need to make credible its promise to get the public finances in better shape, such policy inflexibility is reckless. We need to slow down austerity implementation to ensure that the scars this recession leaves on the economy are not deeper than need be.

The slowdown began with a collapse in economic demand. However, it is looking more and more likely that this will get locked in by a contraction of supply. A contraction in supply means that we will find it harder to produce ‘stuff’ at the same rate as before. That a fall in demand can feed into a permanent downgrade to our growth prospects is a phenomenon known as hysteresis by economists. If demand for a firm’s output is depressed for a prolonged period, machinery may be scrapped and businesses could decide not to follow through on planned investments. The chaos in the financial sector has resulted in credit being allocated inefficiently at the wrong cost. Others note that a worker’s productivity can be harmed by unemployment. If one is out of a job for a long time, workplace skills start to fade and you become less employable. In addition, the longer someone is out of a job, the more likely it is for them to drop out of the labour market altogether. For example, women may decide to stay at home, early retirement may become an option or that back pain that’s always plagued you may become a reason to seek different types of benefits.

All of this acts to depress the trend rate of growth that the economy can sustainably achieve and will ultimately make it harder to pay those dreaded debts. With slower growth, tax revenues will remain depressed for longer than the Treasury and OBR expected when making their budget projections. Preventing the temporary blemishes associated with recession from becoming permanent scars is of upmost importance.

Unemployment of all ilks is associated with economic and social ills but the current concentration of joblessness among the young and low skilled is something of particular concern. Youth unemployment has especially pernicious consequences, affecting the individual and economy for far longer than the spell of joblessness itself. Those experiencing spells of unemployment while young face significant wage penalties and a higher risk of future joblessness compared to their peers for decades, even after controlling for a wide array of individual and family characteristics. For example, see the evidence in Gregg and Tominey (2005) for the UK and Mroz and Savage (2006) for the US. Thus, the fact that 18% of 16-24year olds are ‘NEETs’ (Not in Employment, Education or Training) should be sending alarm bells ringing through Whitehall. Their current idleness is not just an awful waste of their talents at this particular moment but makes it more likely for them to become trapped in dead-end areas of the labour market for much of their adult life. This is unfair for them, it’s not their fault that their birth date dictated they join the workforce during the worst post-war recession, as well as being highly damaging to the wider economy.

Furthermore, as the riots bought to attention earlier in the summer, unemployed youths facing a dearth of opportunity are not guaranteed to sit quietly. Unsurprisingly, increases in youth unemployment are associated with a range of social ills. For example, Carmichael and Ward (2001) found youth unemployment is associated with a statistically significant increase in burglary, fraud and forgery, theft and total crime rates. A third of NEETs agree with the statement that their life has ‘no purpose’. The social consequences of a large number of marginalised youths, who are assess their lives as purposeless, are scary to think about.

Some argue that government led job creation is a misnomer. They are wrong. The government has a role in supporting employment through this recession. Bold, innovative programmes are required to help ease the jobs crisis. Given the uncertainty and pessimism that currently clouds private sector vision and judgement, government involvement and financial backing are required to get them started. Technological change and globalisation imply that we also need to shift are thinking on how best to deal with the current labour market woes. Public works programmes represent one strategy to be explored but they are expensive and will create far fewer jobs today than they did in the past. Quoted in The Economist, the major of New York, Michael Bloomberg, notes that new government sponsored construction works will not solve the problem. “The technology is different. If you built the Hoover dam today, you would do it with far fewer people… The average worker standing in line for benefits tends not to be muscular.”

One new idea which I find particularly attractive is the creation of a small business bank. It could either be created through an initial injection of government capital or bonds funded by the Monetary Policy Committee and make use of existing agencies to allocate and dispense the loans. Credit allocation is currently a total mess. Banks aren’t lending to solvent businesses which need cash to invest and grow. If such a bank was set up, it could offer loans to small businesses at low rates, potentially concentrating funds in areas of especially afflicted by unemployment. This strategy has a number of attractions. Easing the funding restrictions on entrepreneurs and small businesses should help to kick-start innovation and growth while supporting employment. The focus on small businesses should prove especially affective at job creation. Research funded by the Kauffman Foundation shows that all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old. Further, no one can turn round and say, “Oh, think of the benefits culture you’re creating”. This strategy is positive; it’s about supporting new ideas and existing businesses to thrive. In this way, the roots of the problem, as well as its consequences, are targeted.

Over the last few decades, a polarisation of the labour market into ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ jobs with little in between has been noted. Many routine manual jobs can now be coded up and performed by computers and machines. Other jobs are now able to be performed by individuals on the other side of the world. These hard facts need to be acknowledged by policymakers and reflected in the design of new labour market policy. Training and education systems need to be overhauled to reflect the new set of skills needed by employers. However, we also need to sit back and think through the consequences that these developments have for our vision of the modern job market. What can be done to best prepare individuals for the new world of work? How can we make the distribution of work more equitable?

These are hard questions but a few things are self evident with little deep thought. Slowing the pace of public sector redundancies will slow the rise in unemployment. Creation of something like a small business bank would not have to add to the public sector debt and could help propel the recovery forward. The government cannot afford to be complacent. A slower recovery adds to the cost of fixing their finances and creates long term hardship for many in society. The UK economy is Desperately Seeking Stimulus. Plan B is for Bankruptcy? Bullshit.

3 Comments

Posted in Fiscal Policy, UK Current Affairs, UK Economy

Tagged , , , ,