Unit 4 Macro: Linda Yueh - New Column on the Global Economy
The BBC's Chief Business Correspondent Linda Yueh @lindayueh has new page on developments in global economy http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/lindayueh/ - definitely one for students and teachers to follow. The opening article focuses on a concept that we have been pushing in our own macro coverage in recent times, namely the emergence of a multi-polar world economy with growth coming from a bigger number of countries / regions and less dependent on the advanced western economies. Read the article here
Unit 2 Macro: UK and US Growth Compared
In this short Financial Times video, Vicky Redwood the Chief UK Economist of Capital Economics looks at why economic recovery in the UK has been slower than in the USA since the end of the last recession.
read more...»Paul Ormerod: Sovereign debt and Euro zone reality
The recent debacle in Cyprus has essentially been shrugged off by the markets. The European Central Bank vigorously asserts the crisis in the Euro zone is over. So why is there continued unease about the financial viability of countries such as Spain and Portugal, a morass into which even the French are now being dragged?
Economic theory helps us understand a bit more about why this is the case. One thing which the last few years in Europe have shown very starkly is the massive difference between debt which is denominated in nominal terms and that which is in real terms. Nobel Laureate Chris Sims makes the point clearly in his recently published Presidential Address to the American Economic Association.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Unemployment in Germany - The Hartz Reforms
Germany’s low unemployment is in large part due to the ‘Hartz Reforms’, which started as early as 2003 and have reduced the long-run rate of unemployment by 1.1%. That is the central finding of research by Matthias Hertweck and Oliver Sigrist, to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2013 annual conference.
Unemployment rates across much of Europe have surged to unprecedented levels in recent years, particularly among the southern countries. In contrast, German unemployment has continued to fall even during the Great Recession. The authors conclude:
‘Our results build a solid basis for the macroeconomic effectiveness of such labour market reforms. This is particularly important for policy-makers across Europe who are currently planning to undertake similar structural reforms.’
Unit 4 Macro: Unemployment in Europe (March 2013 Update)
The scale and depth of the unemployment crisis in Europe is confirmed by fresh figures released by Euro Stat. Unemployment in the Euro Zone was 12.0% in February 2013 and the jobless rate for the European Union as a whole was 10.9%. Last month there were 26.3 million people counted as out of work in the twenty-seven countries within the single market, 19 million of whom live in Euro Zone countries. In the last year alone, unemployment in the Euro Zone has jumped by over 1.7 million but this aggregate figure hides large country differences and persistent regional and local variations. Here is the contextual data to take into the exam:
Unit 2 Macro: Fresh Serving of Acronym Soup - ZIRPs and PLOGs
Economic commentators love their acronyms and abbreviations - they come in handy when reaching character capacity limits on a tweet and also for students fighting the exam clock to complete a timed essay. Two new ones have come to my attention in recent days. What does ZIRP and PLOG mean to you?
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: FDI in Africa
Revision blog on the economics of foreign direct investment in Africa with a special focus on investment from China and other BRIC countries
read more...»Infrastructure spending: perhaps the UK is not so bad after all…..
The economics news, and this blog, has recently featured the debate between those who favour more government spending on public infrastructure and those who favour sticking to the role of austerity, in the search for growth - see the debate (or spat) between Krugman and Sachs, Vince Cable's article in the New Statesman and Liam Fox's speech to the IEA last week for a range of different views. The idea that more UK spending on 'shovel-ready projects' (if such a thing exists) would help to kick start the economy through multiplied growth of GDP suggests that we don't spend enough. And this view would be borne out by those who suffer damaged car tyres from potholes, hold-ups on the roads and railways from lack of maintenance, and delayed or re-routed air travel when the airports can't cope with adverse weather. However, an article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend suggests that the UK's spending is well ahead of other countries,and that Germany in particular has a real problem with aging, collapsing infrastructure.
Unit 4 Macro: Growth and Development in South Korea
As part of our revision for the Unit 4 macro paper we have been discussing in school growth and development issues in South Korea. The country now has a per capita income in excess of $30,000 and is a high-income developed country with membership of the OECD. Having escaped the middle-income trap, can South Korea continue to prosper or will the country have to modify their development strategies to meet fresh competitive challenges and changing expectations?
Unit 4 Macro: Doughnut Economics - Growth and Welfare
Oxfam senior researcher and former co-author of the UN's annual Human Development Report Kate Raworth visits the RSA to explain 'doughnut economics' - the bold new theory that is sweeping the development world
Unit 4 Macro: Abenomics - Changing Monetary Policy in Japan
Are you following important macroeconomic developments in Japan? The new government of Shinzo Abe is reforming monetary policy - including a change to the inflation target - and undertaking more aggressive fiscal measures. Will it work in lifting the Japanese economy to a higher growth plane after two decades and more of sluggish growth and the debilitating effects of price deflation?
read more...»Paul Ormerod: Today Singapore and Japan, Tomorrow China
It has suddenly become fashionable to be concerned about China’s growth rate slowing down. This is not a matter of a short-run cyclical downturn, with normal service being resumed shortly as the economy roars ahead once more. It is a worry that there will be a permanent slowdown by the end of this decade. Instead of annual growth rates around 10 per cent and even more, the Chinese economy will settle down to the much more sedate rates seen in the West in the 1950s and 1960s in the range 3 to 5 per cent.
read more...»
Unit 4 Macro: The UK Economy Outside of the Euro Area
Evaluating the UK’s macro performance outside of the Euro Zone
- Decision made in 2003 that the UK would remain outside
of the single currency
- UK remains a full member of the single market
- Supportive of further EU enlargement but distanced from deeper fiscal / banking intregration
Crucial question both in the short and medium term is whether non-participation in the Euro makes a significant difference to key macro outcomes
- Real GDP growth, estimated Trend growth (LRAS)
- Core CPI inflation and inflation expectations
- Employment and unemployment rates
- Trade balances (with EU and beyond)
- Trends in relative productivity and per capita incomes
Unit 2 Macro: Video Resources on the German Economy
Having German exchange students in my lesson has provided a super opportunity to discuss the position of the German economy within the Euro Area and to compare and contrast macroeconomic indicators between the UK and Europe's largest economy. Here is a selection of some of the video clips that have been used as prompts for discussion.
read more...»Paul Ormerod: Springtime for America
Is America heading for a boom? Real GDP has risen for 13 successive quarters and now stands
3 per cent above its peak level. A
net total of 4.8 million jobs has been created over the past three years, with
a fall of half a million in the public sector being massively outweighed by the
5.3 million rise in the private.
But welcome and sustained though the recovery is, it hardly
constitutes a boom. And it
certainly does not when compared with the growth rates seen in the recovery
from the last major financial crisis in the 1930s. The slump was of course much worse, with output falling in
every single year during 1930-33.
The rebound was spectacular.
GDP rose by no less the 43 per cent between 1933 and 1937.
Unit 4 Macro: A Manifesto for Growth - the LSE Growth Commission Report
On Thursday 31st of January 2013, the long-awaited LSE Growth Commission Report was published and launched in London. The document itself is available for download from this link and I urge all teachers and students interested in growth, competitiveness and the fairness agenda to have a look at it. It is full of rewarding and important insights into the drivers of balanced growth in a modern advanced economy.
I will be adding new resources and links to this blog following the launch event
Key Points from LSE Growth Report
Existing Strengths
- Strong rule of law
- Generally competitive product markets
- Flexible labour market
- A world-class university system
- Openness to foreign investors and migrants
- Independent regulators including competition authorities
- Strengths in many key sectors including high end manufacturing
LSE Commission Growth Agenda
Education
- Greater autonomy for schools, tackle the long tail of under-performance. Conditional cash transfers for families to pupil attendance and performance. Focus league tables less on % attaining 5 A-C grades. Reveal performance at the bottom end.
- Concentrating on skills (improving human capital) gives people the resilience to recover from global shifts in the division of labour
Infrastructure
- Critical infrastructure essential for competitiveness in modern economy. For the UK, transport and energy are infrastructure areas with biggest issues; there has been a lack of clear strategy and lots of dithering / political delays.
- Huge opportunities for UK - industrial revolution driven by search for low-carbon technologies driving innovation - can the UK keep up?
LSE Commission proposes:
- 1) Strategy Board (for planning)
- 2) Planning Commission (for delivery)
- 3) Infrastructure Bank (for funding)
Innovation
- Innovation is the third channel for increased growth
- Problems in UK capital markets mean innovation is not properly funded - short-termism remains a structural weakness of the markets
Banking/ Finance
- More competition in retail banking
- Business bank that prioritises lending to SMEs and innovative firms
Changing the compass of economic performance
- Commission suggests that focus on GDP is not helpful
- GDP misses out on who gets the growth and measures production not income
- Need more focus on Median Household Income
- Median household income and GDP per capita have been decoupled since about 2002. GDP no longer tracks it
Overall
UK trend growth rate can be lifted by 0.5% with effective structural reforms - large compound effect on incomes over the long run
Institutions and incentives matter for growth. Macro stability important too. UK politics too short term and adversarial. Fundamental weakness is the failure to create a stable policy framework.
More focus needed on evidence based policy making to make government smarter.
Here Professor John Van Reenen, Director of CEP and co-chair of the LSE Growth Commission, presents a 'manifesto for growth' for the UK economy over the next 50 years, backed up by the Growth Commission's report.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Global Economic Power Shift Continues
There are several research organisations out there producing regularly updated forecasts on what is likely to happen to the relative shares of global GDP and income per capita over the long run. Typically the forecast stretches out to 2050 and necessarily involves plenty of uncertainty. But these over the horizon studies are quite interesting in their own right because they remind us of the changing drivers of growth in the world economy.
Here is one of these reports - World in 2050 The BRICs and beyond: prospects, challenges and opportunities - produced by economists at PriceWaterhouseCoopers
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Smarter Ways of Measuring Trade in a Globalised World
To fully understand trade, we must understand the value added at each stage ...... a crucial line in a new report from the OECD on the challenges of measuring the value of trade in a globalised world with deeply integrated supply chains. This is an important issue, traditional trade data rarely tells us the full story - a key evaluation argument that can be made in Unit 4 macro papers.
For example, the OECD report finds that one-third of the total value of motor vehicles exported from Germany actually comes from other countries, while nearly 40% of the total value of China’s electronics exports come from foreign sources.
read more...»Teaching Macro: Charts on the US Economy
As President Barack Obama prepares for his second inauguration I have put together this set of twenty five charts on the state of play for the US economy. An underlying awareness of some of the major challenges facing the world's largest economy provides great context for students writing on many other issues, for example US-China trade relationships, or connections between the USA and her NAFTA partners or emerging economies in Latin and South America.
The charts cover the following areas:
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: The World Trade Organisation (WTO)
Revision notes and resources on the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: The Failure of Austerity
Here is a selection of links and news videos on the vexed economic, social and political issue of fiscal austerity - there is a particular focus on the effects of austerity in the debt-ridden crisis countries of the Euro Zone
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: Key Term Glossary
An updated glossary of key terms for AS macro
read more...»Prospects for the UK Economy in 2013
As the sun rises on another year will the headwinds be favourable for Britain or are we facing up to another year of stresses and strains? Here is a brief commentary and overview of some of the key macroeconomic data for the UK economy together with some links to external articles and videos on economic prospects for Britain as we head in 2013.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: The Great Spanish Crash
Here is a link to Paul Mason's recent documentary on the rise and fall of the Spanish economy. A superb hour on the travails of one of the key countries inside the Euro Zone
read more...»econoMAX - Has the Global Economy become a Bloc-o-holic?
As econoMAX Editor Liz Veal reports, in the post war period, the world economy has increasingly separated itself into trading blocs. Trading blocs have grown in size and some have become more economically integrated.
read more...»The Fiscal Cliff Explained
A superb short video here from Chris Lockwood at the Economist which explains the background to the Fiscal Cliff and the policy options being considered.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: OECD World Economic Outlook
The OECD's world economic outlook is published twice and year and is a heavyweight publication with plenty of great relevant macro for ambitious A2 students. I have linked below to their latest report - including a streamed presentation on their key data forecasts and emphasis on some of the underlying challenges facing OECD countries.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Tax Changes to Boost Growth
Reducing the income tax rate and increasing the inheritance tax rate could induce a huge increase in UK GDP, according to research by Professors Alberto Alesina and Guido Cozzi and Dr Noemi Mantovan, published in the latest Economic Journal (December 2012)
read more...»
Unit 3 Micro: Tesco Goes West - Failure in the USA
This ten minute video is ideal for students of business economics. It covers the inside story of Tesco's launch in the US under the brand name Fresh 'n Easy. Business Professor Michelle Lowe of Southampton University was given unprecedented access to the company to study their entry into the US market
read more...»Goldman Sachs - an example of Diseconomies of scale
Several news sources are quoting the fact that Goldman Sachs have only appointed 70 new 'partners' to its directorship this month - the lowest amount of high level promotions in the company's public-listed history. The business appoints the partners as a recognition process for top-ranked employees following the tradition started when it was a private partnership. This relatively small level of new partnerships not only reflects the reduced level of profits made by one of Americas biggest banks, along with a general reduction in staffing of nearly 10% but also recognition that actually bigger isn't necessarily better in the banking world.
read more...»
