Question 3: Which would be the maximal public debt you would be willing to tolerate if used effectively (as in your answers to 1 and 2 above) to support an economic recovery?
Answer:
140% of GDP (e.g. if fiscal support were trippled)
Confidence level:
Not confident
Comment:
Who knows what may be needed. The UK ended the Napoleonic wars and the first and second world wars with vastly higher debt to GDP than 140% of GDP . That debt came down fairly smoothly.
Question 2: Which of the following would have the second greatest impact in mitigating the economic effects of the coronavirus economic crisis in the UK?
Answer:
Financial asset purchases including QE
Confidence level:
Confident
Comment:
Governments will be running huge fiscal deficits. There may be temporary indigestion in bond markets buying a vast amounts of new government debt. The central bank should be willing to buy large amounts of government debt to alleviate this. This is NOT helicopter drops and NOT printing money in the form of non-interest bearing notes to fund spending - reserves are interest bearing, or will become so when central banks put rates back into positive territory and that happens when things start to return to normal.
Question 1: Which of the following would have the greatest impact in mitigating the economic effects of the coronavirus economic crisis?
Answer:
None of the above, other, or no opinion
Confidence level:
Confident
Comment:
The government should temporarily pay a high proportion of the wages of those who are unable to work because their employers cannot produce but on condition they are not laid off.
Question 4: Which of the following policies would be your second choice of policy to boost private sector productivity, in addition to or absent your first choice?
Answer:
Infrastructure investment
Confidence level:
Confident
Comment:
Better links into big cities from areas around them would help a great deal. Unfortunately Britain's biggest transport project - HS2 - seems an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of achieving this.
Question 2: Do you agree that, in a period of great uncertainty and after a prolonged period of weak real wage growth, monetary policy makers can afford to wait for greater certainty about real wage developments and building inflationary pressure before raising interest rates?
It is not likely that waiting until it is clear that a change in rates is needed is optimal. Fortunately, rate changes can be reversed, which is one reason by why waiting is a mistake.
The CFM surveys informs the public about the views held by prominent economists based in Europe on important macroeconomic and public policy questions. Some surveys focus specifically on the UK economy (as the CFM is a UK research centre), but surveys can in principle focus on any macroeconomic question for any region. The surveys shed light on the extent to which there is agreement or disagreement among these experts. An important motivation for the survey is to give a more comprehensive overview of the beliefs held by economists and in particular to include the views of those economists whose opinions are not frequently heard in public debates.
Questions mainly focus on macroeconomic and public policy topics. Although there are some questions that focus specifically on the UK economy, the setup of the survey is much broader and considers questions related to other countries/regions and also considers questions not tied to a specific economy.
The surveys are done in collaboration with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Covid-19: Economic Policy Response
Question 3: Which would be the maximal public debt you would be willing to tolerate if used effectively (as in your answers to 1 and 2 above) to support an economic recovery?
Question 2: Which of the following would have the second greatest impact in mitigating the economic effects of the coronavirus economic crisis in the UK?
Question 1: Which of the following would have the greatest impact in mitigating the economic effects of the coronavirus economic crisis?
The UK Productivity Puzzle
Question 4: Which of the following policies would be your second choice of policy to boost private sector productivity, in addition to or absent your first choice?
Labour Markets and Monetary Policy
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Question 2: Do you agree that, in a period of great uncertainty and after a prolonged period of weak real wage growth, monetary policy makers can afford to wait for greater certainty about real wage developments and building inflationary pressure before raising interest rates?
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