Coppola Comment

I can't stop looking at this table. Mortality rates in England rose between 2011-16 for teenagers and most working-age adults under 50: That's bad enough. But what should give all of us pause is the reason that Public Health England (PHE) gives for rising mortality among young and middle-aged adults: Among people aged 20-44, an increase in mortality rates from accidental poisoning had a negative effect on life expectancy between 2011 and 2016 of -0.06 years in males and -0.11 years in females....  Data from ONS indicate that in this age group, over the whole period from 2011 to 2016, 70% of accidental poisonings were due to drug misuse and 10% were to alcohol. PHE also notes a slight increase in male mortality rates due to cirrhosis, which is in the top 10 causes of death for men. Among women, suicide is playing a slightly larger role: An increase in the female suicide rate in the 20-44 age group also had a small negative effect on life expectancy between 2011 and

Last week I attended a workshop entitled "Enhancing the Bank of England Toolkit," hosted by the Progressive Economy Forum. Presented at the workshop, and underpinning most of the debate, was this report from GFC Economics and Clearpoint Advisers, which was written for the Labour Party and first issued last June. The report was widely criticised at the time, as one of its authors ruefully observed in the introduction to the presentation. Nonetheless, the authors presented it unamended. The report recommends setting a productivity target for the Bank of England in addition to its existing inflation target: An additional target will be introduced: productivity growth of 3% per annum. The Bank of England will be required to explain how its policies are impacting upon productivity and, therefore, the potential growth path of the economy. This target is extremely challenging. A footnote in the report notes that labour productivity growth since 1950 has averaged 2.4%, and

In 1795, the parish of Speen, in Berkshire, England, embarked on a radical new system of poor relief . Due to the ruinous French wars and a series of poor harvests, grain prices were rising sharply. As bread was the staple food of the poor, rising grain prices increased poverty and caused unrest. Concerned by the possibility of riots, the parish decided to provide subsistence-level income support to the working poor. The amounts paid were anchored to the price of bread. Each member of a family qualified for a payment, so the larger the family, the more they received. In effect, it was a system of in-work benefits. Subsistence-level income support already existed for the non-working poor. The Poor Laws , first introduced in Elizabethan times, distinguished between different categories of “poor” and treated them differently. At the time that the Speenhamland system was introduced, the old, inflrm and children were placed in poorhouses, where they were cared for and were not expecte

Sectoral balances can tell us so much about what is going on in an economy. Especially when they are expressed as a time series, as in this remarkable chart from the ECB : Although it is a time series, this is not a rate-of-change chart. The y axis is in billions of Euros, not in percentage growth rates. But the chart nevertheless shows that Eurozone net saving has risen steadily since the financial crisis, except during the Eurozone crisis of 2011-12 when it dipped slightly. What do we mean by "net saving"? The legend appears to conflate saving with investment, and the brief explanation at the bottom of the chart doesn't really help. So here's some simple algebra to sort it out. In national accounting, "saving" is the excess of income over desired consumption. For the private sector, it looks like this: S p = Y - T - C where Y is the net income of the private sector from all sources, T is tax payments, and C is all other consumption. Thus, &q