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Jane Lennie's avatar

I find international economics quite frustrating because I don't know enough about it. Thanks for explaining.

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Martyn Foster's avatar

Interesting idea my fear is always the mismanagement of funds through corruption and inefficiency. We have seen this numerous times through Aid and development funds.

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Bernat's avatar

This might also be relevant for the post and for to also understand the roadblocks of recycling SDRs from a BoE perspective: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/does-sdr-recycling-impair-reserve-management-case-united-kingdom

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Tony Warren's avatar

This is a great post. The cut in the overseas development budget was a blow to Labour supporters like me who feel that the Party should be primarily about helping those less fortunate in life.

Unfortunately, the Government has tied its hands by its own fiscal rules. As a result, we are adopting austerity policies, which are the opposite to what is needed to revive a sluggish economy and restore public services. Cuts will lead to disappointment and opposition from people who associate with us, disunity in the Party and defeat at the next general election.

Having invested so much political capital in the fiscal rules, the Prime Minister will not want to be seen to drop them. We need experts like Jeevun to find creative solutions like this and debt relief.

Another possible area is to set the profits made by the Bank of England through quantitative tightening and high interest rates against public spending. Also, including the full market value of local authority housing assets in the public borrowing calculation (which will include a premium due to change of land use) could enable councils to start building houses again.

Returning to overseas aid, every single life saved and improved due to disaster relief is valuable. However, let’s not forget that the really big reductions in world poverty have been achieved through poorer countries being able to participate in higher value-added activities like manufacturing. Tariffs, sanctions and decoupling make this harder.

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