Monday 7 October 2013

End September Links

# Interesting academic research:
   - Recasting international income differences: The next-generation Penn World Table, Robert C Feenstra, Robert Inklaar, Marcel Timmer
   - Immigration, diversity, and economic prosperity, Alberto Alesina, Johann Harnoss, Hillel Rapoport
   - Creativity, cities and innovation, Neil Lee, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose
   - The economic future of British cities, Henry Overman

# Savings, investments, and a dose of realism - Frances Coppola is nicer than me about greetin' faced savers organisations...

# Typically interesting posts from Chris Dillow, On wage-led growth; & Interfluidity, Not a monetary phenomenon & Terminal demographics

# Chris Dillow gives a pointer towards some literature on diseconomies of scale: The Management Question

# How relevant is this for any proposed Sterling Union? Why asymmetrical monetary unions are bound to fail

# A useful resource: Migration in Scotland

# Interesting column in the Guardian: UK Growth? Make London independent to mend the North-South divide. I'm not sure about conclusion though: "Were the government to publish regional trade figures, they would show that London runs a current account surplus with the rest of the UK, offset by capital transfers from the rich south to the poorer north. As an independent city state, London would have a higher exchange rate and higher borrowing costs. The rest of the country would, by contrast, get a competitive boost." A London GOVERNMENT would be in surplus vis-a-vis the rest of the UK, but that's not the same as London running a current account surplus (selling to more than it buys from) and paying capital transfers north. I suspect that the private savings made by the rest of the UK, on net, go TO London. And it definitely does not seem obvious to me that total capital flows (private savings plus fiscal transfers) are from London to the rest of the UK. Of course I might be wrong...

# From same column, I'm also interested in the point about "the strength of persistence over time in patterns of relative unemployment at local level" (which comes from a Paul Ormerod article in Applied Economics Letters): are markets not flexible enough, or is policy not good enough? If it's the second point then the North-South divide would argue for the existence of policy that was good for the South but not so good for the North. And the relevance of this to the Scottish independence debate is...