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Argues that Great Britain should join the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), spite of the fact that certain important monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate issues still need to be addressed.

Leading indicators are produced by both the OECD and the UK Office of National Statistics as tools for predicting turning points of the business cycle. An assessment on the basis of performance at turning points is frustrated by their scarcity. It is found that the indicators generally have significant (but not good) ability to predict changes in the direction of the variable they are intended to lead. When they are included in VAR models the standard error of quarter on quarter changes is generally lower than when pure autoregressions are used. However, the forecasting power of such equations is poor, and the general conclusion is that such indicators are not good forecasting tools.

The idea of balancing the national accounts can be traced back to the start of national accounting in its modern form. Estimates of national income had been produced in the years before the Second World War, but the first attempt to cast economic data in an accounting framework was that of Meade and Stone (1941). A year later the first paper on balancing the national accounts (Stone, Champernowne and Meade, 1942) appeared. Had the least squares approach, which Peter Kenny at the CSO has worked on, been computationally feasible at the time, balanced accounts would probably be taken as a matter of course, and would not be seen as a slightly confusing adjunct to the conventional ways of presenting the data.

We show that when a nominal household income variable is constructed as the geometric mean of household income and is deflated using a price index whose weights are calculated as the average of each household's expenditure shares, the growth rate of the resulting volume indicator is the average of the growth rate of the real income of each household. This indicator, which treats the income growth experience of a high-earning household the same as that of a low-earning household, can be described as democratic. Conventional measures computed from arithmetic means of household incomes and deflated using indices based on aggregate expenditure shares are, in contrast, plutocratic, in the sense that the experience of high-income households contributes more towards the growth in total income than does the experience of low-income households. We show that in the UK over the interval 2005/6 to 2015/16, democratic real equivalized household income after housing costs grew by 0.20% per annum while the plutocratic equivalent grew by 0.52% per annum.

We show that when a nominal household income variable is constructed as the geometric mean of household income and is deflated using a price index whose weights are calculated as the average of each household's expenditure shares, the growth rate of the resulting volume indicator is the average of the growth rate of the real income of each household. This indicator, which treats the income growth experience of a high‐earning household the same as that of a low‐earning household, can be described as democratic. Conventional measures computed from arithmetic means of household incomes and deflated using indices based on aggregate expenditure shares are, in contrast, plutocratic, in the sense that the experience of high‐income households contributes more towards the growth in total income than does the experience of low‐income households. We show that in the UK over the interval 2005/6 to 2015/16, democratic real equivalized household income after housing costs grew by 0.20% per annum while the plutocratic equivalent grew by 0.52% per annum.

The impact of announcements of large-scale purchases of government bonds on real GDP and the CPI in the United Kingdom and the United States is explored with a Bayesian VAR, estimated on monthly data from 2009M3 to 2014M5. Four different identification schemes are used, all leaving the reactions of GDP and CPI unrestricted, and the transmission channels of the policy are examined. An asset purchase announcement of 1% of GDP leads to a statistically significant rise of 0.58% (0.25%) and 0.62% (0.32%) rise in real GDP and CPI for the US (UK). The transmission channels differ in the two countries.