We assess fiscal policy from the perspective of fairness between generations and the relationship between this and national saving , in the context where the United Kingdom is the lowest-saving of all the OECD economies. Cross-section and pooled data suggest that governments are in a position to...

The concept of real national income differs from that of real domestic product. The former has to reflect the terms of trade as well as receipts of net factor income from abroad. In this paper we show how a welfare-based measure of income relies on the deflation of nominal national income by the...

The supply-side argument that taxes on income from capital are distortionary and therefore reduce welfare is widely accepted by economists. We conduct an analysis of taxation of income from capital in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We show that, when young people face liquidity...

Survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. This paper proposes an indicator based on a theoretically consistent procedure for quantifying firm-level survey responses that are ordered and categorical. Firms' survey responses...

We construct a general equilibrium model of a panel of 5000 agents in overlapping population cohorts, with a view to assessing its ability to represent both the macroeconomic and distributional characteristics of the economy; we take account of the income uncertainty which people face and...

Many of the arguments used to justify the Stability and Growth Pact's concern with budget deficits in fact relate to levels of national saving. Countries with large budget deficits tend to have low levels of national saving but some countries such as the UK have low levels of national saving for...

Studies of inflation targeting make the distinction between strict and flexible inflation targeting. The problem of strict inflation targeting has so far been analysed by treating it as a special case of a standard optimal control problem and the algorithms used have not provided an exact...

Britain's public sector deficit in the 1990s has been much too large to allow the public sector to maintain its balance sheet position. In order to do this the current account deficit has to be reduced from its 1995/6 figure of 3_ per cent of GDP to close to zero. Government plans show this...

The 1994 SNA proposes a revised treatment of the output of financial intermediaries which treats intermediation services in part as a component of final demand, so that GDP is higher than the 1968 SNA suggests. We present here the results of attempts to estimate FISIM (Financial Intermediation...

A range of monthly series are currently available giving indications of short-term movements in output in the United Kingdom. As the only available information, these indicators are routinely exploited in various ways although they only provide an incomplete picture of gross domestic product...