Publications
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The prospect of leaving the European Union has acted to hamper much economic activity and the formulation of forward-looking plans over the past three years. The Institute has outlined the consequences arising from the various EU Exit scenarios that the UK may face, each of which will leave output...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Recent trends in global industrial production and trade show activity stalling since late last year. The pace of service sector activity has remained steadier.
Tariff increases and trade disputes have contributed to the weakness in production and trade and have added uncertainty to the global...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Economic growth has stalled and there is around a one-in-four chance that the economy is already in a technical recession.
The outlook beyond October, when the United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union, is very murky indeed with the possibility of a severe downturn in the event of a...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Innovation in economic measurement is fundamental to a better understanding of how our changing economy works and for whom. The ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement is a new forum to promote research on economic measurement and increase dialogue between academic economists, national...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Only half of investment by firms is in physical capital, such as buildings and machinery. The other half is in intangible assets, such as branding, software and training. This has been true for the past two decades or more in the UK, but only if you step beyond the measures in the National Accounts...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
When economists talk about ‘measurement’ they tend to refer to metrics that can capture changes in quantity, quality and distribution of goods and services. In this paper we argue that the digital transformation of the economy, particularly the rise of cloud computing as a general-purpose...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Global trade in the 21st century is characterised by complex value chains. Successful exporters usually rely on quality imports, and exported goods cross borders many times before reaching their final consumer. This poses challenges to economic measurement as well as policymaking because it becomes...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
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 part because they are difficult to analyse with highly aggregated, official data sources that do not...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is often treated as shorthand for national economic well-being, even though it was never intended to be; it is a measure of (some) of the marketable output of the economy. This paper reviews several developments in measuring welfare beyond GDP that were recently...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Mobile phones have been central to ICT innovation since the introduction of the smartphone and constant-quality prices are a barometer of their economic impact. Official consumer price indices (CPIs) indicate that impact differs wildly across countries: for the 2008–18 period, average annual rates...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The UK’s future relationship with the European Union (EU) remains undecided. Brexit-related uncertainty has led to investment plans being deferred and increased stockbuilding.
Under our main-case forecast, based on a ‘soft’ Brexit and continuing uncertainty, GDP growth continues at around 1½ per...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Recent data indicates that the global output growth cycle has peaked. We expect global GDP growth to continue, but at a slightly slower pace than in the past two years.
Tariff increases and trade disputes have contributed to slowing growth and have added uncertainty to the global economic outlook....
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Immigration is a key economic and social issue: it has fuelled economic growth and prosperity, changed the demographic composition of the UK and shaped much of the political agenda. It played a role in the outcome of the EU referendum vote, leading the Government to seek to remove free movement...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
As Britain prepares to leave the EU immigration policy has come to the top of the policy agenda. The Brexit vote was seen as a vote against free movement and new policies are aimed at introducing more restrictive controls. The report by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in September 2018...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
In an era of free movement UK employers have had ready access to a supply of labour from the European Union to fill lowskilled jobs. This has enabled them to adopt business models, operating within broader supply chains, that take advantage of this source of labour and the flexibility that many...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper examines the implications of labour migration models that rely on employer sponsorship. According to UK government proposals, long-term migration into high-skilled jobs after Brexit will require workers to be sponsored by employers, while workers in low-skilled and low-wage jobs will...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Free movement has been at the heart of the Brexit debate, with the government grappling between satisfying public and business demands for restrictive and liberal approaches to immigration respectively. In response the government have advocated temporary migration as a potential solution, including...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
A new skills-based immigration system, with a preference for the highly-skilled, is central to UK policy debates in the Brexit context, arguably responding to majority public opinion on migration. Through qualitative fieldwork with British, Polish and Romanian citizens living in two local...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Economic activity showed a marked slowing in growth in several countries during the second half of last year. The key issue for the forecast concerns to what extent this slowdown may presage a more widespread and deeper slowing in economic growth. Our central view continues to be that global...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The main development since our last forecast is that the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union did not take place on 29 March as had been planned. Instead, the exit date has been pushed back to 31 October 2019, with the possibility of leaving earlier if some way around the existing...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The UK’s recent productivity performance has been strikingly weak. Output per hour worked, which increased by around 2.1 per cent per year in the decade leading up to the economic downturn, increased by just 0.2 per cent per year in the ten years following the global financial crisis. This paper...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper builds upon Bartelsman, Lopez-Garcia, and Presidente (2018) and provides empirical evidence on the cyclical features of labour reallocation in a sample of European Union (EU) countries over the Great Recession and the slow recovery. The analysis makes use of cross-country micro-...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper uses plant-level estimates of total factor productivity covering 40 years to examine what role, if any, productivity has played in the decline of output share and employment in British manufacturing. The results show that TFP growth in British manufacturing was negative between 1973 and...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
I summarise new facts on hours worked differences across countries and their driving forces. The facts are derived from a comprehensive analysis of micro data sets. First, hours worked are substantially higher in poor than in rich countries. Second, lower hours worked in Europe than in the US can...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Recent data suggests that the global growth cycle has probably peaked. We forecast world GDP growth of around 3.5 per cent a year over the next two years.
On that basis, the second decade of the 21st century will have seen sustained global GDP growth.
Tariff increases and trade disputes seem likely...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
On average, UK productivity performance in the decades leading up to the financial crisis was quite disappointing. Joining the EU was not to blame. Indeed, EU membership, which was an integral part of the Thatcher reform programme, had a significant positive impact. Over the long run, UK supply-...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Unanimity on the question of UK exit from the EU is not within reach, but this does not mean that the House of Commons or the population at large can not find a way out of the current Brexit impasse that is fair and legitimate. We discuss different voting procedures which satisfy some important...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The UK’s future relationship with the European Union (EU) remains undecided even though the Article 50 exit date is less than two months away. Brexit uncertainty has intensified since our last forecast and is now evident in various indicators.
Our main forecast is conditional on a ‘soft’ Brexit...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
There continues to be considerable discussion in all of polite society about the causes of the productivity puzzle. Commissions and Inquiries have been set up and answers sought with the most recent, the Industrial Strategy Council, having its inaugural meeting in November 2018. The National...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The Institute is a world leader in macroeconomic modelling and forecasting. It has produced quarterly economic forecasts for around sixty years, supported by macroeconomic models. The aim of the original builders of macroeconomic models was to transform understanding of how economies worked and use...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The Institute has long examined overseas developments in order to understand better domestic macroeconomic dynamics.The organising principle for much of the postwar period was simply the impact on net trade with an implicit view on whether the exchange rate was at an appropriate level and, as such...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper charts the evolution of mainly empirical research at the NIESR over the1970s and 80s. As was all too evident there were very large discrete technical improvements in data handling and manipulation over this period. Less well appreciated were the effects on the economy of major supply-...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the UK’s oldest independent economic research institute, was founded exactly eighty years ago. The Institute’s original mission was “to carry out research into the economic and social forces that affect people’s lives and to improve the...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The global economy is set to continue to grow at a pace of slightly below 4 per cent a year in the near term.
Oil prices have risen further and with some advanced economies appearing to be operating at close to full capacity, there is a risk that inflation will increase. Our expectation is that any...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The future relationship between the UK and the EU remains unclear. Despite that uncertainty the economy has gained momentum over the last few months, fiscal outturns have been better and financial markets appear to be sanguine about the uncertainty. It is against this backdrop that the Chancellor...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2018), ‘The Lack of Wage Growth and the Falling NAIRU’, National Institute Economic Review, August, pp. R40-R55.Doi: 10.1177/002795011824500114.
From page R48, 2nd column, final paragraph, to page R50, 1st column following the italic text the following...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This article takes a short personal ‘helicopter ride’ over the main policy issues in the UK labour market, putting them into the context of the developments which have taken place in applied econometrics. We overview NIESR’s role in the study of labour economics in postwar Britain and review some...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
UK labour productivity is significantly lower than that of many other similarly advanced economies and has been so for decades, with negative implications for UK living standards. To make matters worse, during the last ten years labour productivity growth has stalled in most industrialised...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
In housing affordability levels and volatility, there could hardly be a greater contrast than between the UK and Germany. Differences in history, institutions and policies are explored in this paper. Residential housing supply has been far more expansionary in Germany and mortgage credit more...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper summarises the evidence from recent research relating to the British Planning system’s impact on the supply of development. Planning serves important economic and social purposes but it is essential to distinguish between restricting development relative to demand in particular places to...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This article summarises the long-run decline in housing affordability in England and suggests this is substantially attributable to shortfalls in housing supply. Public attitudes to housing have become increasingly pro-development in recent years and the current policy framework – summarised in the...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The paper discusses the many reasons why housing policy can appear to be both incoherent and ineffective - with too many Departments involved each with different objectives and a plethora of policies pulling in different directions. Drawing on earlier research findings the paper discusses three...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Financial stability reports published by central banks and commentaries by international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) frequently highlight the high level of debt (private sector or public sector or both) as an important risk...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
Last year the global economy expanded at its fastest pace since 2011. We expect global growth to continue at a similar rate in 2018 and 2019.
We expect the pace of global economic expansion to slow to around 3.5 per cent a year in the medium term unless productivity growth picks up substantially....
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The UK economy is facing an unusual level of uncertainty because of Brexit. This uncertainty primarily stems from the yet to be defined relationship between the UK and the EU but also from the economy’s response to the new framework once it emerges. The UK government’s White Paper, which set out...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
The housing market is a source of much comment and tension in the UK. Many commentators and policymakers have got into the habit of describing the market as ‘broken’, indeed we take our title from the White Paper issued by the then Department for Communities and Local Government in 2017. In our...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
In this note, we argue that a considerable part of the explanation for the benign wage growth in the advanced world is the rise in underemployment. In the years after 2008 the unemployment rate understates labour market slack. Underemployment is more important than unemployment in explaining the...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
In his Spring Statement, the chancellor said that he saw light at the end of the fiscal tunnel. We are afraid that this will turn out to have been an illusion. While public borrowing has been reduced to sustainable levels, our analysis of the prospects for the public finances points to severe...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
This paper introduces a special issue of the Review on how the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) is being used to navigate uncertain times. NiGEM is the leading global macroeconomic model, used by both policy-makers and the private sector across the globe for economic forecasting...
Type: National Institute Economic Review
There is a strong case for boosting public investment in many countries based on identified country-specific structural weaknesses and the relatively low levels of such investment. This paper analyses the potential macroeconomic benefits of increased public investment using simulations on NiGEM....
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