The Political Economist

This week I was in London where I attended the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty (follow the Twitter feed on #Liberty2014 ) organized by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) (here's a link to some blog posts I wrote for them). It was an international conference held in London's historical Guildhall to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the CPS by Sir Keith Joseph and Lady Thatcher. It featured a series of world class speakers; from professors such as Niall Ferguson, Luigi Zingales, Deirdre McCloskey, Richard Epstein, Deepak Lal, Art Laffer, to former and current politicians such as Australia's ex-PM John Howard, Estonian PM Taavi Roivas, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski, British MEP Daniel Hannan, UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, retired US army General Petraeus, and a number of journalists, businessmen and the like. And of course the CPS chairman Lord Saatchi who presented a new policy aimed at restoring...

Following the death of Margaret Thatcher , her legacy still remains a controversial issue for some. However, the data on the economic recovery of the British economy during her tenure are relentless - they point out to declining unemployment (after an initial necessary spike in order to allow the economy to restructure ), falling inflation, lower government spending, lower tax rates, a balanced budget by the end of the tenure, falling debt-to-GDP by the end of the tenure, rising disposable income, rising productivity , and high levels of GDP per capita growth. Her reforms enabled a new sustainable growth model for the UK which kept their economy rising steadily for quite some time. Privatization of inefficient state industries, the fight against vested interest and oligopolies (both in the financial industry and among the unions), the Big Bang of 1986, opening up the country to new competition, and a whole range of other industrial, regulatory and legal reforms all led to the moderni...

Margaret Thatcher , one of the greatest political leaders in the 20th century, has passed away earlier today at the age of 87. In the words of UK PM David Cameron , "today we lost a great leader, a great Prime Minister and a great Briton".  Source: The Telegraph Out of the many kind words expressed for her today, I particularly enjoyed the one from Nick Robinson at the BBC:  "As prime minister, she was determined to repair the country's finances by reducing the role of the state and boosting the free market. Cutting inflation was central to the government's purpose and it soon introduced a radical budget of tax and spending cuts.  Bills were introduced to curb union militancy , privatise state industries and allow council home owners to buy their houses .  Millions of people who previously had little or no stake in the economy found themselves being able to own their houses and buy shares in the former state-owned businesses . New monetary p...

I wrote another text for the Centre for Policy Studies , on Margaret Thatcher's legacy in the UK: Vuk Vukovic, lecturer of Political Economy and Principles of Economics at the Department of Economics, Zagreb School of Economics and Management (ZSEM), writes on Margaret Thatcher's role in the specialisation of the UK workforce and its benefits, and points out her successors failed to understand the lessons she provided.  Click here to see the rest of my CPS writings. Here's the  whole text :  "Many leftists in the UK tend to search for a deeper cause of the current recession. For them, it wasn’t the irresponsible spending and a large welfare state creating a dependent economy during New Labour (and particularly their response to the crisis in 2008), but rather it was the “Big Bang” of 1986 and the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 made by Margaret Thatcher that led to a rapid accumulation of risk and power to the banking industry. Little do they know t...

I started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies , an independent free market think tank, co-founded in 1974 by none other than Margaret Thatcher, and Sir Keith Joseph. This is where the "Conservative revolution [of the 80-ies] began".  Here's a quote from Lady Thatcher about the CPS: "I do think we have accomplished the revival of the philosophy and principles of a free society, and the acceptance of it. And that is absolutely the thing that I live for. History will accord a very great place to Keith Joseph in that accomplishment. A tremendous place because he was imbued by this passion too. We set up the Centre for Policy Studies, and it has propagated those ideas, and they have been accepted." Margaret Thatcher, 1979 My first text for them, entitled  Seeking a Dynamic Recovery , was mostly on ideas on how to ignite a dynamic recovery in Western Europe. It focuses on innovation, investments and trade as the essential principles for surpassing...

This post was also published on the Adam Smith Institute blog .  The UK Chancellor George Osborne announced his Autumn Statement today, and here are some immediate UK think tank reactions. In summary, the Autumn Statement wasn't surprising; it seems that the taxpayers were bearing the burden of the crisis in order for the government to spend that money on wasteful infrastructural projects, mortgage guarantees (see here ), loans to businesses (see credit easing ) and essentially is trying to guide (dare I say centrally plan) investment incentives in the economy.  Within the Autumn statement one proposal in particular caught attention, and it was a policy earlier announced by the LibDem Deputy PM Nick Clegg. The UK government wants to subsidize businesses in hiring young unemployed workers, precisely from the ages of 16 to 24, by offering £1bn to the private sector to take young workers into apprentice schemes.  Under a typically political decision and explanat...