Janet Yellen: her global minimum tax plan lacks detail and is impractical On 5 April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said America wants a global agreement fixing a minimum corporate tax level. This follows President Biden’s announcement that he planned…
Author: Edmund O'Sullivan
I am an economist, author, reporter and media executive.
Intangible capital can pay for Sunak’s long-term Covid plan
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is planning to announce a long-term post-Covid economic plan in his annual budget statement on 3 March. It’s likely to include higher spending on the National Health Service and support for businesses hit…
Ending Covid economics will be harder than killing the virus
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is working on a 10-year post-Covid economic plan It’s a year since the Covid-19 mutation started spreading and governments everywhere acted to contain it. More than 2m people globally have since died due…
Fear of a Trump comeback haunts Biden’s economic policy
Three former presidents were the star guests for the inauguration last week of Joe Biden as the US’ 46th president. Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama hugged and mugged for the cameras in open delight that Donald Trump…
Capitalism has no future when there’s no risk
Britain’s Rubber Brexit: soft and flexible
PM Boris Johnson yesterday signed the Trade & Co-operation (TCA). It will define the UK’s future relationship with the EU to replace Britain’s full membership which ended on 24 January 2020. The TCA has more than 1,200 pages and was…
Data doesn’t create value; people do
A report published in August by London’s Institute for Public Policy Research gets one big thing right but an even bigger one wrong. The author — former Jeremy Corbyn advisor James Meadway — is right to assert that electronic data…
What does epidemiology have in common with economics? Imperfect models
Epidemiology has been a cornerstone of public health policy in western societies for more than 150 years. It can perhaps be traced back in its modern form to 1850 when the Epidemiology Society of London was created to track and…
In the short-run we may all be dead: defining the principles of Covidnomics
In 1890, Cambridge Professor Alfred Marshall published Principles of Economics, considered the first complete economics text book. Arguably, it’s the source of everything the discipline comprises. Marshall’s key idea was distilled into a graph where demand and supply curves intersected…
Sunak’s budget is history’s first virus-proof economic plan
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s first budget, which called for the biggest increase in British public spending for 25 years, is a seminal moment for economic policymakers. The plan for next financial year that he announced in the…