Here is an Italian estimate of the fiscal multiplier, which doesn’t have to rely on military expenditures as other authors (including myself) have done.
And here is an account of the German current account surplus which resonates with older theories of capital exports: it is, according to the author, anything but a testament to German ‘competitiveness’ (whatever ‘competitiveness’ means).
The Live Register figures for March are out.
The standardised unemployment rate in March was 14.7%, unchanged from February. This compares with the latest seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 14.7% from the Quarterly National Household Survey in the fourth quarter of 2010, and an annual average of 13.6% for 2010.
By way of comparison, the baseline forecast for 2011 unemployment in the Central Bank’s PCAR macroeconomic scenario is 13.4%. In the adverse scenario, this rises to 14.9%. We are almost there, and it is only March.
At least the Central Bank scenarios got the 2010 unemployment numbers right! This contrasts with their 2010 GDP numbers, as Dan O’Brien pointed out earlier in the week.
(And I admit that I am baffled by an adverse house price scenario that is not robust to the ‘What if Morgan Kelly is right?’ objection.)
These are some of the issues raised in this provocative piece by Pradhan and Taylor.
The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity are now freely available on the web. This is a really terrific resource which I hope will be of interest to lots of our readers. For example, you can read what some of the top economists in the world were saying at the time about the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the EMS crisis of 1992/3, and the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, to name just three examples.
One of the things that has always marked out economic history as a subfield within economics is its focus on the economics of technological change. The Habbakuk thesis held that the high wage environment of the United States helps explain the nature of that country’s technological progress in the 19th century, and Bob Allen has recently argued that high wages and cheap energy are key to understanding the British Industrial Revolution.
I was pleased to see John Bruton referring to this in his recent LSE speech.
Since this is the weekend, here is another example of directed technological change (or at least, such is Roger Cohen’s interpretation), this time from Denmark.