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Executive SummaryThe UK economy faces more than usually uncertain times. Outside the European Union, and in an increasingly challenging global environment characterised by ageing populations, climate change, populism, protectionism, and more, the country needs to chart a new course. This may well require policymakers to consider unconventional approaches to monetary and fiscal policy and, at the very least argues for important modifications of the current policy regime, including the autonomous mandate of the Bank of England.At some point, there will be a major slowdown in economic activity. Yet the Bank of England has very little leeway to respond by cutting interest rates, and it has already adopted an armoury of unorthodox tools that may be decreasing in effectiveness. More radical monetary approaches would be likely to be politically controversial; and are not without risks. In these circumstances it would be a mistake to rely solely, or even largely, on monetary policy to maintain demand. It would be better to conduct monetary and fiscal policy in tandem, and for discretionary fiscal policy to be required to play a much more active role in demand management than hitherto. This would, for example, imply major extension of the automatic stabilisers and efforts better to calibrate discretionary initiatives with the business cycle.But given the long-term pressures on the public finances, more fundamental changes in the structure of spending and taxation are needed, along with a redrawing of fiscal rules and targets, under independent budgetary oversight. The current, historically low, share in GDP of public spending is itself unsustainable in light of the demand for services of an ageing population; plans should be made to raise it closer to the European average. In the most extreme circumstances it might become necessary to waive the fiscal rules entirely and for the Bank of England directly to underwrite fiscal stimulus in order to sustain aggregate demand. It would be wise for the authorities to consider the options in detail now, while the environment is still relatively stable.

I construct a new composite measure of systemic financial market stress for Canada. Compared with existing measures, it better captures the 1990 housing market correction and more accurately reflects the absence of diversification opportunities during systemic events. The index can be used for monitoring. For instance, during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, it reached a peak second only to the 2008 global financial crisis. The index can also be used to introduce non-linear macro-financial dynamics in empirical macroeconomic models of the Canadian economy. Macroeconomic conditions are shown to deteriorate significantly when the Canadian financial stress index is above its 90th percentile.

Uses statistical methods to examine the relationship between two key macroeconomic indicators - inflation and economic growth - and 4 measures of political instability. Using a panel research design and fixed effects regression analysis, examines whether contemporaneous relationships exist between these two groups of variables and then the direction of causality between them. The findings suggests that the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and political instability runs primarily from the latter to the former, raising doubts about the widely held view that poor economic conditions generally produce unrest and instability. (Original abstract - amended)

Macroeconomic variables such as government expenditure , interest rate, exchange rate, trade, inflation rates, unemployment, foreign direct investment and imports of goods and services have proven to be very volatile over time in Ghana and do have potential impacts on the growth of manufacturing firms. This scientific research thus seeks to unravel the causal relationships between some of these crucial macroeconomic indicators and their impact on the growth of manufacturing firms in Ghana. The growth of firms here is basically evaluated in terms of the manufacturing value added as a % of GDP though many research have often focused on real GDP as measure of growth. Manufacturing firms operating in the industrial sector of Ghana is our main focus here as the majority of firms in Ghana fall under this sector though GDP growth rates of manufacturing firms varies with other subrelated sectors like mining and construction. Some of the crucial macroeconomic indicators being explored in this work includes labour force, government expenditure, real effective exchange rate and trade variable as a % of GDP. The major sources of data of this work was secondary data and were obtained from world bank site and the Ghana Statistical service website. The data gathered for econometric analysis are a set of time series and spanned the period from 1990 to 2014.The ordinary least square method was employed with the use of Gretl software for obtaining our estimated co-efficient and the entire econometric analysis was performed in a multiple regression model. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the government of Ghana should should adopt some prudent macroeconomic policies in order to ensure that manufacuting firms experience a surge in growth