Budget Consolidation Options for the UK

2009 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 58-60
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell

The increase in UK public sector net borrowing in the past year, plotted in figure 1, has been in part a result of the decline in economic activity, and also a consequence of the change in housing and financial market transactions. The former is predictable with every 1 per cent decline in output below trend producing a decline in net revenues of of between one third and three fifths of a per cent of GDP depending upon the reason for the decline in output. The loss from the decline in asset-related revenues is harder to judge, but the April 2009 budget suggested that revenue losses might be more than 1 per cent of GDP.

1981 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 32-45
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

The forecasts we have made for the UK economy during the past year have all shown not just the end of the current downturn, but a noticeable, if small, recovery in economic activity subsequently. On this occasion the profile differs (table 1); although the decline in GDP seems to have ended in the last quarter of 1980 there is now no forecast of a recovery before the end of 1982. As a result of upward revisions of data for the past the estimated decline in GDP in 1980 of 2.7 per cent and the forecast further decline of 1¼ per cent in 1981 are similar to those we published in November. The level of GDP suggested for 1981 is also little changed but its composition is different (table 2).


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (11) ◽  
pp. 2412-2441
Author(s):  
Sergei V. ANUREEV

Subject. The article investigates the rationality of internal controls in accordance with COSO-INTOSAI recommendations in public sector organizations. Objectives. The aim is to classify the reasons for failures and the actual refusal to directly follow the COSO-INTOSAI recommendations in public sector organizations in Russia and the UK, as well as to determine the directions for the rational development of internal control in such organizations. Methods. The study employs the content analysis of domestic and foreign sources, the comparative analysis. Results. The study classifies the reasons for failures, i.e. excessive universalism and inanity of recommendations borrowed from professional participants of the financial market, hiring employees from financial markets, erroneous creation of additional units, procedures and documents, objective lack of authority, motivation and qualification of employees to implement the recommendations. The areas of rational development are determined on the basis of sector specifics, real powers of budget fund managers, professional duties of chief accountants as controllers, reasonable centralization and digitalization of public services. Conclusions. The findings may clarify the regulatory and departmental documents of the Ministry of Finance and managers of budget funds in internal control of public sector organizations, and improve the performance of such organizations, increase the efficiency of budget spending and off-budget operations.


1988 ◽  
Vol 126 ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
R.J. Barrell ◽  
Andrew Gurney

The upturn in economic activity that has been clearly visible for the last year in both Japan and the US now appears to be spreading to Europe. The factors affecting the upturn are diverse, but it appears to be investment led, at least in the US and Japan, and to a lesser extent in Germany and the UK. Chart 1 plots the investment to income ratio for the major four economies over the past, along with our forecast for the medium term. The investment-income ratio has fallen in France and Germany over the past ten years, but it has reached relatively high levels in Japan in the last four years.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.


Author(s):  
Vito Tanzi

This book deals with practical or real life aspects of public finance. It focuses on the growth in the activities of governments, in a world that expects more than in the past from governments. The book focuses on the growing complexity in both the work of the private market and that of the public sector. It stresses that part of the growing complexity is due to the more ambitious role that governments tried to play today, while part is due to choices made by governments, so that complexity may be partly avoidable. This was important in the different pursuit of social welfare by different countries. Complexity has increased opportunities for abuses, for rent seeking, and for mistakes in policies. It may also have increased the attraction of populist policies that claim to offer magical or easy solutions to problems. A major conclusion of the book is that the objective of simplicity in laws and in policies should be given more importance by both economists and governments.


Author(s):  
Yoosun Park

Social workers were involved in all aspects of the removal, incarceration, and resettlement of the Nikkei, a history that has been forgotten by social work. This study is an effort to address this lacuna. Social work equivocated. While it did not fully endorse mass removal and incarceration, neither did it protest, oppose, or explicitly critique government actions. The past should not be judged by today’s standards; the actions and motivations described here occurred in a period rife with fear and propaganda. Undergoing a major shift from its private charity roots into its public sector future, social work bounded with the rest of society into “a patriotic fervor.” While policies of a government at war, intractable bureaucratic structures, tangled political alliances, and complex professional obligations all may have mandated compliance, it is, nevertheless, difficult to deny that social work and social workers were also willing participants in the events, informed about and aware of the implications of that compliance. In social work’s unwillingness to take a resolute stand against removal and incarceration, the well-intentioned profession, doing its conscious best to do good, enforced the existing social order and did its level best to keep the Nikkei from disrupting it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Taylor

This paper aims to cast light on contemporary migration rhetoric by integrating historical discourse analysis. I focus on continuity and change in conventionalised metaphorical framings of emigration and immigration in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800 to 2018. The findings show that some metaphors persist throughout the 200-year time period (liquid, object), some are more recent in conventionalised form (animals, invader, weight) while others dropped out of conventionalised use before returning (commodity, guest). Furthermore, we see that the spread of metaphor use goes beyond correlation with migrant naming choices with both emigrants and immigrants occupying similar metaphorical frames historically. However, the analysis also shows that continuity in metaphor use cannot be assumed to correspond to stasis in framing and evaluation as the liquid metaphor is shown to have been more favourable in the past. A dominant frame throughout the period is migrants as an economic resource and the evaluation is determined by the speaker’s perception of control of this resource.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


Author(s):  
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier

The restrained state has always sought to devalue socially reproductive work, often consigning it to the private family unit, where it is viewed as a natural part of female relational roles. This marginalisation of social reproduction adversely affects those performing it and reduces their resilience to vulnerability. The pandemic has largely shattered the liberal illusions of autonomous personhood and state restraint. The reality of our universal embodied vulnerability has now become impossible to ignore, and society’s reliance on socially reproductive work has therefore been pushed into public view. However, the pandemic has also exacerbated harms and pressures for those performing paid and unpaid social reproduction, creating a crisis that demands an urgent state response. As it is argued in this paper, the UK response to date has been inadequate, illustrating an unwillingness to abandon familiar principles of liberal individualism. However, the pandemic has also created a climate of exceptionality, which has prompted even the most neoliberal of states to consider measures that in the past would have been dismissed. In this paper, it is imagined how the state can use this opportunity to become more responsive and improve the resilience of social reproduction workers, both inside and outside the home.


1976 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Craig West

Students of the origins and accomplishments of government regulation of economic activity have open suspected that the laws on which regulation is based were addressed to problems and conditions of the past that no longer prevailed, or — what is worse — assumptions about the “real world” that are highly unrealistic. This is Professor West's main conclusion about the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, especially as regards its discount rate and international exchange policies.


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