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GDP growth hasn't been anaemic in recent years. It's been pretty much the same it always was (outside of the GFC) https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/g

GDP growth hasn't been anaemic in recent years. It's been pretty much the same it always was (outside of the GFC) https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth Set the graph to 25 years and take a look. Quarterly GDP is a pretty stable value - to the extent there's any sort of lower average since the recession (which is a bit hard to eyeball) which such a small difference level it can easily be a measurement artifact. GDP calculations get changed from time to time and the changes aren't marked on the graph. As for low productivity growth in the UK, one of the reasons economics has a bad reputation is because of "mysteries" like this. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/productivity https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/productivity Look at the 25 year graph. Growth flattens off around 2004. Gee, what happened in 2004? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe... Since 2004 the UK has had waves of unlimited immigration from ex-Soviet states that are extremely poor by comparison. It's been one of the most popular destinations for immigrants due to being English speaking, good at creating jobs and so on. What do we expect in an environment where cheap labour is abundant? We expect, firstly, stagnant wages after adjusting for inflation: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/supplementaryanalysisofaverageweeklyearnings/september2018 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... (look at the graph of real vs nominal in figure 1) And we expect low productivity growth because you get that through automation, but why automate anything when wages can't rise because there's an endless queue of people waiting to take jobs. There's no sign of this changing on the horizon. Johnson talks about changing the immigration system, but he is naturally very pro-immigration and always has been. With nobody to challenge him on the horizon and a bureaucracy so intellectually dominated by unlimited immigration thinking it actually can't say what the UK population even is, I would be willing to bet on a continuation of the UK's long term productivity stagnation. From a purely productivity-oriented perspective though, the good news is that the productivity stagnation isn't "real" in the sense of "we don't know how to raise productivity", it's just delayed by the lack of any need to. In contrast US productivity growth has continued in a fairly stable way. There are plenty of ways to boost productivity lying around. If wage growth continues to accelerate for whatever reason, productivity growth will follow some years later.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
GDP growth hasn't been anaemic in recent years. Go to that chart, select 25 years then click on the graph button and select trend. It doesn't look healthy.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Sure. Now do the same with MAX (from about the 1950s) and it's back to being a nearly straight line. The differences we're talking about here are very small. GDP calculation is meanwhile way less precise than economists like to pretend. For instance GDP per capita for the UK is frequently quoted as if it's a meaningful statistic. But ONS population statistics are labelled as "experimental". In other words the government doesn't know how many people are in the country, making GDP per capita (dividing GDP by population) a meaningless value. Modern GDP is meant to include illegal activity, i.e. something governments try to wipe out when they find it. How are you meant to precisely add up the total value of all illegally exchanged goods and services? It can only ever be a wild guess. UK GDP stats for Q1 are almost always wrong and get revised later in the year. This error is systematic yet it never gets corrected. What I'm getting at here is that such a tiny trend in a field as unreliable as economics doesn't let us conclude very much.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    It only looks straighter because the X-Axis units are larger. We still end up at the same destination, anaemic growth.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      I guess this gets us into the question of what is "anaemic". To me that means "much lower than it used to be" which isn't the case. What are you comparing against here? What would not anaemic look like?
jotm 7y ago
Tying immigration to productivity loss? I thought immigration leads to an increase in productivity (but also wage stagnation). Why did other EU countries not suffer the same around 2004? Germany's looks like it skyrocketed. Same with Switzerland's. France, Benelux and Spain show an increase in productivity. Italy, which chose to not apply any restrictions in 2007 (RO/BG ascension) shows a massive increase post 2007. Norway, which is not a popular destination, has a weird curve. The United States has around the same percentage of immigrants per year as the UK - ~0.3% of the total population. Canada's is double that (and rising) at 0.65%. Explain their continued growth in spite of immigration? Or maybe it's due to it? Mexico's productivity is dropping, fwiw.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

GDP growth hasn't been anaemic in recent years. Go to that chart, select 25 years then click on the graph button and select trend. It doesn't look healthy.

thu2111 7y ago
Sure. Now do the same with MAX (from about the 1950s) and it's back to being a nearly straight line. The differences we're talking about here are very small. GDP calculation is meanwhile way less precise than economists like to pretend. For instance GDP per capita for the UK is frequently quoted as if it's a meaningful statistic. But ONS population statistics are labelled as "experimental". In other words the government doesn't know how many people are in the country, making GDP per capita (dividing GDP by population) a meaningless value. Modern GDP is meant to include illegal activity, i.e. something governments try to wipe out when they find it. How are you meant to precisely add up the total value of all illegally exchanged goods and services? It can only ever be a wild guess. UK GDP stats for Q1 are almost always wrong and get revised later in the year. This error is systematic yet it never gets corrected. What I'm getting at here is that such a tiny trend in a field as unreliable as economics doesn't let us conclude very much.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  It only looks straighter because the X-Axis units are larger. We still end up at the same destination, anaemic growth.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    I guess this gets us into the question of what is "anaemic". To me that means "much lower than it used to be" which isn't the case. What are you comparing against here? What would not anaemic look like?

jotm 7y ago

Tying immigration to productivity loss? I thought immigration leads to an increase in productivity (but also wage stagnation). Why did other EU countries not suffer the same around 2004? Germany's looks like it skyrocketed. Same with Switzerland's. France, Benelux and Spain show an increase in productivity. Italy, which chose to not apply any restrictions in 2007 (RO/BG ascension) shows a massive increase post 2007. Norway, which is not a popular destination, has a weird curve. The United States has around the same percentage of immigrants per year as the UK - ~0.3% of the total population. Canada's is double that (and rising) at 0.65%. Explain their continued growth in spite of immigration? Or maybe it's due to it? Mexico's productivity is dropping, fwiw.