ST CATHARINE'S POLITICAL ECONOMY SEMINARS: MARTIN WEALE

Wed 22 October 2014

Mill Lane Lecture Rooms

MARTIN WEALE joined the Monetary Policy Committee in 2010 and was reappointed in 2013. This followed a term of fifteen years as Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Before this he worked as a researcher and lecturer in Economics at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare College and, for two years after graduating, as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow at the National Statistics Office in Malawi. He has studied a large number of aspects of applied economics at both macro and micro-economic levels. He has recently been working on issues connected with rebalancing. He has also carried out a substantial amount of work on various aspects of economic statistics and short-term forecasting. He is a part-time Professor at Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Weale was appointed CBE for his services to Economics in 1999 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 2001. Cambridge University, from which he graduated with a BA in Economics in 1977, awarded him a ScD in Economics in 2006. He received an honorary doctorate from City University in 2007.

In this seminar Martin Weale will discuss the outlook for the British economy as he sees it. He will draw attention to the likely interaction of demand and supply, paying attention to the implications of these for both output growth and inflation over the next three years. He will discuss pay pressures and the inferences which might be drawn from these for the degree of slack in the economy, and will also discuss the extent to which the evidence supports the idea that there is a substantial degree of under-employment present. He will present his views of the factors which have made it sensible to hold Bank Rate at 0.5 per cent since 2008 and the extent to which these are likely to persist over the coming quarters. Finally he will offer some thoughts about the likely long-term effects of the crisis.

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (m.kitson@jbs.cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query.

Cost: Free