Management

The British Growth Crisis

---

Since 2007 the question of growth has plagued the British economy. Though, at the time of writing in the early summer of 2014, growth has returned, a pervasive anxiety about the solidity, stability and sustain- ability of that growth persists, even in the most hallowed of elite polit- ical circles. Thus, even the recently appointed Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is concerned that the short-term boost in economic output that has occurred since 2013 is a product of the re-stoking of an inherently unstable and, indeed, further de-stabilising housing bubble, much like that which burst to precipitate the crisis in the first place. Britain, even in his terms, would appear to be dancing on the edge of the precipice once again. For the much-vaunted ‘rebalancing’, presented as a necessary pre-condition of any return to a stable growth dynamic by the principal parties and the cornerstone of the Coalition’s economic policy rationale, has yet to materialise. By almost all available economic indicators the British economy is more unbalanced today than it was in 2007 (for a more detailed assessment of which see Berry & Hay 2014), and that gives a rather different complexion to the return to growth since 2013. Re-contextualised in this way it looks all too like the product of a rather desperate, short-term, and carefully targeted pump-priming of the housing market (using tools like the Coalition’s Help to Buy scheme). This, as Carney himself is close to admitting, can only end badly.
That this is so, we argue, is the product of Britain’s failure to find a new growth model to replace the one that took us over the precipice once before and threatens, in its new incarnation, to do so a second time. As that suggests, Britain’s growth crisis continues. It is that crisis that forms the subject of this volume.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

The British Growth Crisis

Call Number

-

Publisher

USA : Palgrave Macmillan., 2015

Collation

1-337

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978–1–137–44151–5

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Economics

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment