The Sloman Economics News Site

An important issue in the October Budget was the effect of the Chancellor’s decisions about taxation and government spending on the public finances. What would happen to the public-sector deficit (a flow concept measuring the annual excess of public-sector spending over public-sector receipts) and public-sector debt (a stock concept measuring the accumula...

In the recent blog, Uncertain times: why firms and households may hold back and wait and see, we saw how uncertainty affects decision making by households and firms. Such uncertainty also a...

These are extraordinarily uncertain times. In this blog we consider an interesting way of capturing this through an index constructed through a technique known as data mining. We also address ways in which uncertainty might affect economies by focusing on the motivation for people and businesses to ‘wait and see’.

Although UK household energy prices are not as high as they were in 2022 and 2023 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they have recently been rising again. This is increasing the squeeze on household budgets at a time when many people are struggling to make ends meet.

Ofgem, the UK gas and electricity regulator, caps household unit ener...