With Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s increases set to take the overall tax burden to 35 per cent of GDP by 2025/26 – the highest level since the late 1960s under Labour Chancellor Roy Jenkins – it is clear he is planning to get public finances back on a sound footing. But, in his Budget statement yesterday,

The Chancellor stood up this lunchtime with two major tasks: to ensure that the UK economy recovers post Covid and to bring public finances back under control. Despite the record-contraction in GDP in 2020, it was never going to be too difficult to get the economy to bounce back this year as long as vaccination

After Nigel Lawson’s great tax reforming budget in 1984, which cut the headline rate of corporation tax from 52% to 35%, I visited the then IBM Head of Tax Worldwide in Armonk, New York in my role as the IBM UK Chief Economist. I asked him if he was aware of the change, which he was,

At the time of writing some four million Texans are reportedly without power in freezing conditions. Winter storm Uri and a loop in the jet-stream bringing the polar vortex south, have led to record-breaking low temperatures across parts of the southern US.  Rising electricity demand coupled with failure of power stations means that the grid operator,

Rishi Sunak’s £400bn balancing act: With the Budget fast approaching, here’s how the Chancellor can raise revenues without wrecking the Covid recovery The last new tax proposed by an economist was the poll tax. That didn’t end well. So it is with trepidation that I put forward suggestions for Chancellor Rushi Sunak, on how to

In the years since Bitcoin first entered the public eye, it has gone from a relatively obscure and fringe cryptocurrency to an increasingly mainstream digital asset. Indeed, it appears that the crypto initially known for its fully anonymous features is in the process of becoming an accepted and legitimate payment method and asset. The price

The coronavirus pandemic has been a challenge for economic forecasters. While we at Cebr have probably fared better than most other forecasters (our March 2020 forecasts revision predicted global output to decline by 4.0% for the year at a time when many of our rivals were still forecasting growth – the latest data suggest the

An estimated 1.8 million businesses could be at risk of insolvency as a result of pandemic-related disruption, including 336,000 that face a high risk of going bust, research has found. The winter wave of Covid-19 has resulted in business sentiment taking a fresh battering in January, with only about one in three companies reporting positive trading conditions,

In Q3 2020, a record 16% expansion in GDP helped push productivity in the UK – as measured by output per hour worked – to the highest it has ever been. Much of this can be attributed to sectoral factors, with traditionally low productivity sectors such as hospitality accounting for a smaller share of the economic

Telecoms company BT’s Openreach division is accelerating the roll-out of its gigabit-capable full fibre broadband across the UK, with the aim of connecting 20 million households and firms to the network within the next 10 years. Gigabit-capable full fibre broadband provides the fastest and most reliable connection to the internet. As the pandemic and social

My colleagues and I at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) are quite optimistic about the pace of the UK recovery once lockdown ends. The accumulated household savings at the end of 2020 had built up to £200 billion and will be more by the time we are let loose in a few

Once Joe Biden is sworn in on 20th January, the Democratic Party will not only be in charge of the White House and the House of Representatives but also the Senate, following the surprise victories of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s run-off election on 6th January. It will be the first

There are two reasons for expecting that the market structure in tech sectors will differ from the model of perfect competition with plentiful companies competing on price, quality and increasingly innovation. First is the economics of information. Once some research has been completed, the costs of replication are very low. So we get what I

View the full article here. Significant expansion expected in milestone year After a tumultuous year that most people would prefer to forget, what now for 2021? As the new year begins, the pandemic still looms large, with the number of cases continuing to rise sharply in many Western countries. China was the only major economy

View the full article here. China and the US have vied for economic superiority but the pandemic has “tipped the rivalry in China’s favour”. China is set to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest economy five years earlier than previously thought, thanks in part to its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to