The Five giants
Foreword by Paul Johnson
Lack of economic growth over the last two decades has had desperately damaging consequences for living standards, for generational equity, and for our public services. We set out these consequences in Britain’s Prosperity Gap and showed why getting back to a decent rate of growth is the most important challenge facing the country.
Of course, that is not the only thing that matters, but without growth making progress on all the other things about which we care – reducing poverty, tackling regional inequalities, funding decent public services – will be either much harder or simply not possible.
There is no magic bullet which will give us growth, no single lever we can pull to return the economy to the sorts of growth rates that we got used to in the decades before the financial crisis. But that is not a reason for despair. For one thing the UK has many underlying strengths.
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Neglect
Authors: Jeegar Kakkad, Shivani H Menon
Britain has committed too little capital and channelled too much of what it does commit into unproductive assets. This manifests in three ways: workers with too little capital to work with, growing firms that cannot raise what growth requires, and world-class clusters starved of the capacity to expand.
1/3
less capital available per hour worked for British workers than those in the US, Germany, France and the Netherlands, on average.
£4bn
annual equity funding gap between US and British companies
143
industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in Britain, against 449 in Germany and 446 in Japan.
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gridlock
Authors: Bertie Wnek
Gridlock is the barrier to proportionate regulation that makes building faster and cheaper.
The quality of delivery of major capital programmes in Britain has declined dramatically in the last century. A poor delivery record ultimately deters investment and results in a lower stock of infrastructure and housing than there otherwise would be. There is a well-established link between infrastructure and economic growth.
COMING SOON
Discouragement
Authors: Scott Corfe, Rahat Siddique
The barrier to tax and welfare systems that reward training, work and enterprise
COMING SOON
myopia
Authors: Ross Gray
The barrier to fiscal architecture that rewards long-term decisions
COMING SOON
Powerlessness
Authors: Andrew Harrop
the barrier to power held closer to the places that can use it, so every region can grow