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 (Cebi) 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

View the full article here. Britain has retaken fifth place in the rankings of the world’s biggest economies despite suffering one of the deepest recessions in the pandemic. According to the annual league table produced by a leading British economics consultancy, the UK has leapfrogged India and will accelerate away from France in the decade after Brexit.

Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year points out that: ‘One mischief always introduces another. These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things….and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune’. So much for forecasting. As far as I

Click here to download the full report. Since its first publication in 2009, Cebr’s World Economic League Table (known as the WELT) has established itself as the go to measure of the comparative economic success of different countries. Media of all kinds around the world eagerly await the release of the latest issue every Boxing

Cebr welcomes the announcement of a provisional deal between the UK and the EU to regulate the post Brexit partnership. Obviously this deal remains unratified but we would expect it to be ratified, not necessarily without glitches. We will be examining the details in the coming days and will comment accordingly. As we said in

View the full article here Apermanent extension of the stamp duty holiday could lead to thousands more property transactions each year, according to research commissioned by Kensington Mortgages. Estimates from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) suggested a reduction in the rate of stamp duty would lead to 37,000 additional property transactions taking

The full report can be downloaded here Executive Summary Stamp duty has long been a controversial tax. Critics highlight the role of the tax in stifling housing market activity and the seemingly arbitrary penalty it applies to properties that change hands more frequently, while advocates point to the tax’s progressive structure and its role in

In April, Cebr forecast that in Q2, households would accumulate £23 billion more in savings than in a normal year. This note updates our projections, to calculate the total savings amassed by UK households in 2020 as a whole. We find that households will save 19% of their disposable incomes in 2020.[1] This is more

Covid-19 has brought about many difficulties for businesses in the UK. From a loss of demand, to new policies for social distancing, most enterprises have seen their resilience tested and have had to adapt to new ways of working in 2020. This report, for E.ON, measures the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on a range