Woodhorn - Celebrating Coal Community and Creativity
On the morning that news of the death of Margaret Thatcher came through on the news wires, I was visiting Woodhorn Colliery Museum near Ashington in Northumberland. It was an eagerly anticipated journey having seen the Pitmen Painters (now on a national tour) a few weeks earlier.
The play celebrates the work of the Ashington Group of painters who began studying art as part of an Workers' Educational Association course in the mid 1930s and eventually found themselves on a life-changing pathway as they drew inspiration from their life and work in the pit communities of the North East.
If you are in the North East please pay a visit to the Woodhorn Colliery Museum. First of all, it is free save for the £3 car parking charge. Second there is a stimulating, evocative and often moving exhibition on the rise and eventual fall of the coal mining industry in the UK. Just a few weeks back Maltby Colliery one of the last deep mines in England, was closed as owners Hargreaves Services said it was no longer viable. And the Daw Mill colliery in north Warwickshire recently shut down with 650 jobs being cut, after a big fire at the facility which made future use of the mine impossible. Despite a plethora of open cast mines, there are now only two deep mines left in the UK at Kellingley Colliery in Yorkshire and Thoresbury Colliery, Nottinghamshire both run by UK Coal.
read more...»Economics at the Movies - Promised Land
Here is another film to add to our collection of films with an economic dimension. Promised Land from Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant stars Matt Damon and is an anti-corporate thriller that centers on the controversial natural gas process of fracking.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Growth and Development in Angola
A brief overview of economic developments in Angola, one of the fastest growing countries in the world - contains updated links to study resources on Angola.
Evaluating UK economic performance
Robert Peston has an interesting piece on his BBC blog, considering what the UK's GDP growth would look like if it was possible to extract what he calls the 'bad bits' - financial services and North Sea oil and gas extraction - both of which are in serious decline. He suggests that we have been too dependent on these two sectors, and that both are now in serious decline. In particular, that the global financial services industry is now protecting itself by becoming much more national and less internationally interconnected, so that the City - as the world's most open and global financial centre - has therefore suffered.
Slow return to a British export led recovery?
Aggregate Demand may be stimulated by an increase in exports. Ha-Joon Chang, Author of the best seller, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism considers reasons in a short article for The Guardian why this hasn't happened after Sterling had fallen against other major trading economies. " Compared with ...2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond."
It may help students consider plausible policies to reduce its trade deficit, a macroeconomic goal overlooked in arguments over fiscal and monetary policies to control inflation or output. Finally it may aid evaluation, how different are the most pressing short and long term macroeconomic challengers facing UK governments.
Link to most trade figures.
Unit 4 Macro: Land Grabs and Development
Land
Grabs have become an important and controversial issue
in development economics in recent years.
Unit 4 Macro: Brazil - economic slowdown continues
Unit 4 Macro: The Rise of Resource Nationalism
In many countries, resource nationalism has become more frequent in recent years, indeed it has been one of the key stories in 2012 as several countries have introduced new resource taxes, natural resource licence reviews and expropriation of assets from private sector companies. This Financial Times news video looks at the trends including resource nationalism within countries as provinces and regions look to exert great control on the revenues from oil, gas and mining projects.
See also: Economist: Foreigners beware - oil and mining in Indonesia
Resource insecurity: New report from Chatham House
Interactive resource: New political economy of natural resources
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Changing Patterns of Exports
A selection of visualisations from the MIT Media Lab Observatory of Economic Complexity - these cover changes in export patterns for a small cluster of developing and developed countries. What are the most notable and perhaps significant changes that students can identify?
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Primary Export Dependence
Many lower-income developing nations still relying on specializing in and exporting low value added primary commodities. The prices of these goods can be volatile on world markets. When prices fall, an economy will see a sharp reduction in export incomes, an adverse movement in their terms of trade, risks of a higher trade deficit and a danger that a nation will not be able to finance investment in education, healthcare and core infrastructure.
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Unit 3 Micro: OFT Investigates the UK Retail Fuel Market
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has announced that it is launching an investigation into prices at the pumps amidst fears that the retail market for petrol and diesel is not operating properly and causing damage to the welfare of fuel buyers including millions of motorists and businesses.
For a long time motorists have complained that the prices they pay are quick to rise when the world price of crude increases, but the cost of filling up the tank falls much less quickly when crude oil is available on international markets at lower prices. This BBC news video report provides some background.
Our chart below tracks the weekly average price of petrol and diesel against a benchmark international price for crude oil - is there any evidence here for the wrath of customers?
Unit 4 Macro: Kenya invests in geothermal energy
Here is an example of a fast-growing developing country in Africa making important investment to help meet ambitious targets for supplying energy from renewable sources. Katrina Manson films and reports for the Financial Times from the Great Rift Valley on Kenya’s latest plans to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity.
The fixed costs of finding geo-thermal sources, build the turbines and then connect to Keyna’s energy grid are huge. But a move towards smaller geo-thermal energy plants provide a more cost efficient approach. Successful investment will help to reduce energy imports, provide a viable alternative to uncertain hydro-electric power, create new jobs and contribute to Kenya’s search for sustainable growth.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Erratic Energy Supplies Threatens Indian Growth
This news video report from the Wall Street Journal is superb in highlighting the economic consequences of the chronic shortages of energy and fuel in the fast-growing Indian economy. The focus is on a newly opened coal-fired power station (note the investment in it from Hong Kong and China) which has already had to close dow production twice because it has run out of coal supplies.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Dambisa Moyo - Winner Take All
Dambisa Moyo was on great form when she spoke to the Economics Teacher National Conference in London last week. Her new book Winner Take All investigates the causes and consquences of rising global demand for commodities. In particular Dambisa Moyo predicts increasing geo-political tensions and conflicts as countries scramble to secure ownership and supplies of land, water, energy and minerals. In this blog I have linked to some of Dambisa’s recent media appearances as Winner Take All was launched in the USA and here in the UK.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Russian Government and Falling Oil Prices
Russia is one of the world’s biggest producers of crude oil and gas and the price that these energy supplies fetch on world markets have a disproportionate effect on Russian GDP growth, their balance and payments and the Russian government fiscal position. In the summer of 2012 oil prices in particular have been falling quite sharply - a concern for the Russian Finance Ministry
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: High oil prices and consumer demand
World crude oil prices are falling back from their recent highs and this will bring blessed relief to hard-pressed consumers and many businesses in the UK. High oil and gas prices effectively act like a tax on consumption because they increase the prices of many goods and services for which demand is price inelastic. Yea we can try to switch to more energy-efficient products over time - and many people are doing this albeit at a short term cost - but essentially when petrol and home energy costs rise, it causes a direct hit on the real purchasing power of millions of households, many of whom have barely seen any rise in their wages over the last couple of years.
Sir Terry Leahy, formerly CEO of Tesco makes this point in this interview on Channel 4 news
read more...»Investment in Energy Infrastructure
Many people take as given a pressing need to increase capital investment in the infrastructure of our energy sectors - but how strong are the economic and social impacts of such investment? The LSE Growth Commission met this week to discuss this and I have brought together some of the arguments drawing on a number of various twitter feeds
read more...»Tullow Oil and African Development
Yesterday I spent a fascinating evening in the company of Aidan Heavey, Founder and CEO of Tullow Oil plc, Africa’s leading independent oil exploration business and the top performer among FTSE-100 listed businesses on the UK stock exchange. It has approximately 100 production and exploration licenses in 22 countries.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Breaking Down the Cost of Gas
High gas prices impact on millions of households whose energy bills have soared in recent years and have led to a steep increase in fuel poverty among lower-income families. Studying the market for gas is interesting from a micro-economic perspective and a recent article in the Times (covered by a paywall) provided an overview of the breakdown of the cost structure of a typical energy bill from suppliers such as British Gas
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: Might Oil Prices Bring another Recession?
The international price of crude oil has been rising strongly in recent weeks and threatens to be an external factor driving an already weak Euro Zone and UK economy back into recession.
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: The Dash for Gas in Mozambique
In the last twelve months two huge discoveries of natural gas have been made in the East African country of Mozambique. The latest - a deepwater discovery - is said to hold over 210 billion cubic metres of natural gas and investment in exploiting the field could be the major cataylst for a rapid phase of growth and development for one of the world’s poorest countries. The country has large untapped oil, coal and titanium reserves in addition to the gas. According to the UK Trade and Investment body, within 15 years Mozambique could be Africa’s second largest coal producer (after South Africa) and one of the largest coal exporters in the world.
Can it benefit in a sustainable way from exporting these resources or will they prove to be a curse on development?
For many years Mozambique has been afflicted by a brutal civil war which ended in 1992 and then a series of natural disasters including floods in 2001 and 2001 which destroyed much of its infrastructure.Floods were replaced by a calamitous drought in 2002 but more recently the economy has achieved strong growth and progress in lifting people out of absolute poverty. That said, 50% of Mozambicans living on less than $1 a day, foreign aid accounts for nearly half of government spending and there remain severe doubts about whether the dividends of an export-boom in natural resources will feed through the the majority of the population.
The Mozambique government has a 10% stake in the newly-discovered gas fields, it sold a licence to the Italian company Eni to explore for new gas reserves and Eni has committed to building a multibillion-dollar liquefied natural gas terminal in the country as a distribution platform to export mainly to fast-growing Asian economies.
Other transnational companies are investing in Mozambique. Vale, a Brazilian multinational is spending over $3 billion to rebuild and extend the 425 mile Nacala railway and connect it to a deep water port so that Mozambiquan coal can be exported.
Putting the infrastructure in place will take several years and gas production on a huge scale may not start before 2016. Although new industries brings risks as well as opportunities, the potential for a step change in development in the country is enormous.
read more...»Externalities Cartoon
KAL, The Economist’s cartoonist, has produced an excellent cartoon in the latest issue perfect for a discussion of a very topical externalities issue in North America. And one that has also been ‘causing tremors’ in the news over here too!
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Russia Joins the WTO
I am using Russia’s entry to the World Trade Organisation in my teaching on international trade and development this term. It appear to be a significant moment for the global economy. Russia is the last member of the Group of 20 major economies to join, after China gained membership in 2001. Progress towards membership has been delayed by numerous geo-political issues not least the disputes with neighbouring Georgia.
Joining the WTO involves making a commitment to the rules of the international trade system - for Russia as with other new members, this will mean reduced import tariffs, the staged elimination of industrial domestic and export subsidies, and better greater access to foreign companies. Russia will also have to improve adherence to international accounting standards.
read more...»Zondle Game: 10 Question Quiz about OPEC
OPEC continues to be in the news in an age of high and volatile crude oil prices. Here is a ten question quiz on OPEC created using Zondle designed to test student knowledge of this important international group.
AS Micro: What´s really behind the oil price rise?
The price of oil continues to rise ($114.61 per barrel) and there a number of reasons put forward why this is so, none perhaps more pertinent than the reason explained in this WSJ article.
read more...»Externalities of Oil Pollution
The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has just published a set of remarkable photos. Collectively they are a stunning set of images that reminds one of the economic and social costs of the disaster and the nature of externalities - and colleagues may want to return to this resource to stimulate discussion and support visual learners. Here is the link.
AS Micro: The volatile price of crude oil
Few commodity prices are watched as closely as the international price of crude oil. Brent crude is currently trading at over $122 a barrel - the highest price for over two years. Our Timetric chart is constantly updated and will always show the latest price. We have included below links to many of our recent blogs on the economics of oil prices and some of their micro and macro economic effects.
read more...»OPEC oil revenues set to surge above $1 trillion in 2011
A combination of higher prices and higher oil production means that Opec’s oil revenues may exceed $1 trillion in 2011 for the first time. The International Energy Agency has published some new data on Opec production - the revenue forecast includes exports of natural gas liquids and is not adjusted for the effects of inflation. But if you are a Finance Minister of an oil exporting country the price of crude trading at $115 is welcome news especially given the stimulus spending that some countries have introduced as a response to social and political unrest. On some estimates, Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest oil producer and exporter) needs oil to be priced at $83 for its national budget to balance.
read more...»Accessible UK Budget resource
It’s not always easy to navigate your way through the budget, with its mass of technical detail and complexity. Not all of it is terribly interesting either (nor the manner of presentation).
read more...»Timetric: UK Balance of Trade in Oil
The UK economy is now a net importer of oil - a change from the many years of trade surpluses in oil seen from the late 1970s onwards as north sea production and exporting gained scale and momentum. The Timetric chart below tracks the monthly trade balance in oil and the one below it tracks the monthly value of oil exports and imports.
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