How can we grow the UK economy?

Analysis

BBC

Government, Politics, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The cost of living crisis followed a decade in which people’s wages and incomes barely grew. The idea that each generation does at least as well as the one before, has for the moment ended. We’ll only start getting better off again if we can get the economy growing – as it used to in the decades preceding the financial crisis. So, what levers can governments pull to get growth back into the system? Why don't governments do the things that nearly every expert thinks might work? Should we be looking to governments at all? Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies explores the challenges facing the UK economy and asks: how can any government get the UK economy growing? Presenter: Paul Johnson Producer: Farhana Haider Editor: Claire Fordham

Contributors: Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Jagjit Chadha, Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research Stephen Evans, Chief Executive of the Learning and Work Institute Richard Davies, Director of the Economics Observatory Louise Hellem, Chief economist at the CBI. Nicholas Macpherson, former Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. Rowan Crozier, CEO C. Brandauer & Co Ltd Sam Bowan, Editor of Works in Progress

Transcript

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0:41.0	Thank you for downloading this edition of Analysis, the podcast that looks at the
0:46.6	ideas behind the news. In this episode, Paul Johnson asks, what can any government do to get the UK economy growing?
0:57.0	The gas electorate, the food prices, everything going up,
1:00.0	that has had a really massive impact on my well-being with myself and my children.
1:04.8	It's difficult. I haven't been having to work extra hours, doing two jobs.
1:09.2	I think it's reasonable for all of us to have a better standard of living because at the
1:15.6	moment we're not we're just muddling through we're not you know this isn't
1:19.7	normal was it millions of people in the UK are struggling like this today but this isn't a
1:25.4	program about the cost-of-living crisis it's about deeper longer-standing problems
1:29.9	that meant that we entered the recent crisis much much less well off, and hence much less resilient
1:34.9	than we might otherwise have done.
1:37.6	Wages and incomes have been stagnant for a decade and a half, a period without wage growth
1:42.1	probably longer than any other since the Napoleonic Wars.
1:45.6	Those are the real consequences of a rather abstract sounding problem, lack of economic
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