Neoclassical labour market, partial equilibrium, models where employment and real wages are inversely related are too simplistic and far too narrow. A low wage economy is likely to be a stagnating economy with low productivity, low effort, insufficient incentives for education and training, low aggregate demand, little investment and high unemployment. It's a bad macroeconomic equilibrium with many negative social and political consequences and disenfranchised voters. It's a world where populist politicians rise to power and voters who think it can't get worse vote for crazy policies like Brexit. In other words, a world based on myopic models with disastrous outcomes.
Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
They are already playing a role, by complementing hard data with survey views, at least when it comes to monetary policy. I am not convinced that we need to attach even more weight to them, those who advocate their great use are very obviously conflicted (they have built their careers on them, if not their egos).
Question 1: Do you agree that subjective well-being measures, or at least some of the subindices from the typical survey measures, are now reliable enough to give useful insights when used in macroeconomic empirical analysis?
They should be taken into account alongside everything else, but should certainly not dominate the thinking of policy makers. They can be a useful "add-on", if used consistently.
Brexit will make this necessary because the less favoured areas in the UK and those that benefited frim EU structural funds will suffer otherwise, which will increase regional economic disparities.
It needs an industrial strategy that addresses human capital deficiencies, such as skills mismatches in the labour market. The UK is, however, not lacking in strong institutions and strategic collaborations between public and private sectors.
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).
Wages and economic recoveries
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Question 1: Do you agree that lower real wage growth was beneficial for employment levels during the Great Recession?
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Happiness and well-being as objectives of macro policy
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Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
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Question 1: Do you agree that subjective well-being measures, or at least some of the subindices from the typical survey measures, are now reliable enough to give useful insights when used in macroeconomic empirical analysis?
A “new” UK industrial strategy ?
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Question 2: Do you agree that the UK needs a new regional policy?
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Question 1: Do you agree that the UK needs a new industrial policy?
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