In the last two questions you are asked which government policies are best suited to help the UK emerge from its productivity growth slowdown. Question 3 asks for your most preferred policy option, while question 4 asks for your second choice. You may use the comment section to outline specific policy recommendations.
Question 3: Which of the following policies would best help improve private sector productivity?
Answer:
Regulatory and competition policies, possibly including financial regulation
Confidence level:
Confident
Comment:
Much could be done to foster more dynamism in the UK economy, and to remove distortions in the allocation of capital.
Question 2: Which of the following was the second most important cause for the slowdown in UK productivity growth?
Answer:
Human capital including education and employee skills
Confidence level:
Not confident
Comment:
None of the other factors you list seem to me to be potentially important enough to explain it. But the UK has now for a long time relied on immigration to compensate for missing skills in its labor force.
Question 1: Which of the following was the most important cause for the slowdown in UK productivity growth?
Answer:
(Insufficient) investment in research and development
Confidence level:
Not confident
Comment:
The slowdown in investment post-Brexit has lowered the capital stock, which lowers output per hour. Before the referendum, a combination of the housing boom, the financial crisis, and misallocation of capital across sectors all in different ways contribute to either too little or mis-directed investment.
I picked this option because it was the one closer to "Insufficient investment", but I would not add R&D exclusively to that answer.
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:
Investments in human capital including education and job retraining.
Confidence level:
Not confident
Comment:
If fewer high-skilled immigrants want to make the UK its home, the country will have to step up significantly the investment in its universities.
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?
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).
The UK Productivity Puzzle
In the last two questions you are asked which government policies are best suited to help the UK emerge from its productivity growth slowdown. Question 3 asks for your most preferred policy option, while question 4 asks for your second choice. You may use the comment section to outline specific policy recommendations.
Question 3: Which of the following policies would best help improve private sector productivity?
Question 2: Which of the following was the second most important cause for the slowdown in UK productivity growth?
Question 1: Which of the following was the most important cause for the slowdown in UK productivity growth?
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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