Our macroeconomic reliance on debt, and the focus on aggregate demand, is based upon a wide Keynesian consensus.
Less attention is paid to the savings that must provide the funding for investment, the centrality of assets and importance of the core infrastructure systems – natural and conventional. Microeconomic principles, such as the polluter pays and public money for public goods, provide guides for developing sustainable government policies.
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How can we build the sustainable economy, talk at the Oxford Martin School, Nov 2nd 2023
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Now available – Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy
What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation… Read more…
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The cost of capital, the regulatory asset base and risk
Privatisation spawned a whole new industry in the UK dedicated to coming up with numbers for the cost of capital for regulated utilities. It absorbed some of the brightest minds from the university post-graduate economics faculties and built very complex mathematical models which only the few could understand. Some of the answers given are seriously… Read more…
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Podcast 46: The Treasury blame game
The Treasury gets accused of not spending enough on school roofs, on health to cut the waiting lists, on local government and social care, on subsidising battery factories and steel plants, and these are corralled together to blame it for the deep structural problems in the British economy. But are these really the Treasury’s fault?… Read more…
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Podcast 44: Labour’s big bet on economic growth
Labour has been busy setting out its plans for the economy, and its pitch to potential voters, of no new income or wealth taxes. Instead, the essential improvements to public services will all be paid for through economic growth. But are the proposed policies to deliver this growth coherent? This prompts two questions: where will… Read more…
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Labour’s £28 billion
At the first sound of gunfire, the best-laid plans implode. So it is with the Labour Party’s shiny green policies and the £28 billion it had proposed to spend per annum up to 2030. The gunfire in this case comes from two separate directions: the tricky question of where the money is going to come… Read more…
