"Britain is stuck in its worst GDP slump in a century, but not so for jobs."
^^^^ CB: Opposite of US jobless "recovery" ? Maybe they've discovered "zero growth" capitalism ^^^^ "In other words, the disconnect between GDP and jobs. While the economy is, at best, stuck in neutral, Britain has been adding jobs at a better-than-decent clip the past year or so. Unemployment recently reached an 18-month low, and, in absolute terms, more people have a job today than in 2008 (though underemployment is a problem). This combination of zero GDP growth with positive job growth means Britain is working more to do less. Richard Davies of The Economist calculates Britain is 12 percent less productive today than it was at similar points in other recoveries -- and the decline of the North Sea fields and the City probably only explain 1-2 percentage points of this gap. That leaves a pair of, hardly mutually exclusive, possibilities: either Britain has some serious GDP mismeasurement problems or some serious economic problems, full stop. The former is usually the case any time there's an apparent disparity between GDP and jobs data, but the disparity is so large and so persistent in this case that it seems something else is going on. Davies hypothesizes zombie firms are starving new, more productive firms, for credit, which may well be true, but, again, doesn't seem to explain the full scope of the "disaster. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
