Ed Conway

There’s a chart that comes in useful when you’re reflecting on George Osborne’s 2014 Conservative Party Conference speech today. Buried away in an annex to this year’s Budget [pdf] [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/293738/budget_2014_distributional_analysis.pdf]

A few myths about the controversial Barnett formula 1. The Barnett formula is what’s responsible for higher public spending in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales No – it has been Westminster policy to spend more on public services in non-English UK regions for well over a century, since Chancellor George

In the end, everything tends to come back down to a country’s current account – its economic ledger with the rest of the world (everything from trade to financial flows). A country with a large current account deficit (in other words, one that imports and borrows from the rest of

Do you remember where you were on the afternoon of April 16 2013? George Osborne does. He was about to head off to Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund, when, suddenly, the Fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, appeared on Sky News [http://news.sky.com/

It’s tempting to believe that economics has all the answers. Unfortunately more often than not it has all of the questions and none of the answers. A case in point is the Scottish independence saga. At almost every stage in the campaign, we’ve been told that what this

Let’s begin at the beginning. Britain is poorer, much poorer, than it was five or six years ago. If you don’t believe me, take a look at gross domestic product – simply the amount of income generated in the country in a given year. Divided by the number of