A look back at the past 150 years of booms and slumps in the UK economy reveals shifts in how the labour market responds. While the government’s furlough scheme has averted much higher joblessness, it is likely to hamper recovery in output and reduction in the unemployment rate. The current rate of unemployment in the […]
Category: Lessons from history
Since the 1960s, Scotland’s constitutional politics have been moulded by competing assessments of the nation’s contemporary and future economy. The decline of industrial jobs and the economic changes that have followed underpin current independence debates. Competing economic perspectives – primarily on whether Scotland would be better or worse off without the rest of the UK […]
Inflation is damaging to the economy. Recent years have given the impression that public authorities knew how to keep it under control, but the current resurgence has revived old fears. The policy response will benefit from a look at how previous inflations have been tackled. Inflation is a sustained rise in the prices of goods […]
Concerns about the cost of living and the need to measure it stretch back to ancient times. Two centuries of research on constructing price indices suggest that measuring the rate of inflation facing different households, sectors and regions is far from straightforward. Inflation in the UK and elsewhere is rising. This increase in consumer prices […]
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as independent nation states and economies caused limited disruption. This experience offers insights for Scotland as it considers independence from the rest of the UK. In the early 1990s, a number of multinational unions disintegrated in Europe. First the Soviet Union collapsed […]
Catastrophic risks force policy-makers to make quick decisions based on limited information. The Great Irish Famine shows how such existential crises and the state’s response can precipitate radical and permanent change. Ireland’s experience offers insights as we prepare for future emergencies. With one million people dead and another million forced to emigrate, the Great Irish […]
The pound is currently weak against the dollar and, to some extent, the euro. Past currency crises show that the sterling exchange rate can be vulnerable to expectations about the economy, which today may be influenced by the cost of living crisis, post-Brexit trade and prospects for growth. The sterling exchange rate has been sliding […]
The eastern parts of cities like London, Paris and New York are more deprived than neighbourhoods to the west. These higher levels of poverty today can be linked back to pollution levels during the time of industrialisation. We’ve all heard the stories of poverty and hardship from the east side of the metropolitan and industrialised […]
Coal played an important role in the Industrial Revolution, but the air pollution it created eventually acted as a drag on economic growth. As we seek to achieve a net-zero economy, there are important lessons from the energy and industrial transitions ushered in by coal. “We all know the basics of climate change… The additional […]
Experiences from the past suggest that digital currencies – such as Bitcoin, Tether and Dogecoin – will eventually be regulated or monopolised by central banks. A short time after the tumultuous events of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous individual or group, published a white paper introducing Bitcoin to the world. […]