Why fairness matters when the cuts begin to bite
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...
View ArticleWhitehall cuts: what we can learn from Canada and Sweden
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...
View ArticleSpending Review: can transparency trump temptation?
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...
View ArticleWhat to make of the Spending Review speech?
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...
View ArticleThe changing structure of public spending – accident or design?
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...
View ArticleThe fiscal squeeze: now it gets real
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. When you tell our international...
View ArticleWas Gordon Brown’s ‘Economic War Council’ a new model for driving the PM’s...
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...
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