Posts tagged with ‘ Budget deficit ’

The National Economic Committee (NEC) was an ‘Economic War Council’ to drive the government response to the recession. This was a different sort of cabinet committee, that: met weekly (twice weekly at the start) was chaired by the PM and met in the famous COBRA crisis room –  to reinforce the message this was not...

I’ve just returned from giving a seminar in Berlin to public servants from various European countries. They were eager for more details on the UK’s fiscal consolidation.

In 2006/07, I suspect very few people would have agreed that the government should: increase the share of our national income spent on pensioner benefits, the NHS and overseas aid through reduced spend on education, law and order, defence in the event of an unexpected recession, finance the interest on the debt through further reductions...

What we heard certainly had one key ingredient. It sketched out a long term future, one of the key requests emerging from our Citizen’s Jury work in July. There was an emphasis on growth, and ways to get there – particularly protecting science and education, which has strong echos of Sweden and Finland’s successful...

Up to now, the message from the Coalition government has largely been doom and gloom. However, in the last few days there have been a lot of ‘good news’ stories around the Spending Review, such as protecting schools and lesser than expected defence cuts.

At a recent seminar, we decided to take a look under the hood of the Swedish and Canadian consolidations in the 1990s and find out what their administrations actually did. Senior civil servants from both countries gave us much food for thought.

The Institute set out its views on fiscal consolidation, alongside the IFS, in a briefing shortly after the election.  A vital element, based on the experience of countries like Canada and Sweden, is securing a public mandate.