The great ignored: the big deficit and the big market, by Colin Talbot‎ Public Finance

The launch of the General Election campaign yesterday was most notable for what was not said, rather than what was.

We all know the rationalisation: I just bought desirable item X for £50 less than the marked price so I’ve “saved” £50 I can spend on something else. Of course, the £50 isn’t real – it’s just a notional saving and my claim when I get home that “I’ve just saved fifty quid” is greeted […]

City lets George Osborne make a monkey of the voters‎ Times Online In the case of Rayner, according to Colin Talbot of Manchester University, Britain’s foremost expert on public-sector efficiency, only half the claimed …

Listen to my appearance on the BBC Today programme on 1st April on efficiency

see my latest post on Public Finance website

Efficiency Wars, by Colin Talbot‎ Public Finance The first Efficiency Wars occurred in 2004, in the run-up to the last General Election the following year. Labour’s Gershon £21.5bn was pitted against the …

It’s official – the Budget ‘red book’ contained a glaring error about NHS efficiency savings and thus the Chancellor (obviously inadvertently) misled Parliament. The Budget stated: “Budget 2010 confirms that the NHS will deliver annual efficiency savings of £15 to 20 billion by 2013-14.” (Para 6.14, page 90 – my emphasis).

The influential new book “Nudge” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) comes from the emerging field of behavioral economics, which investigates the non-rational ways in which people make decisions. Its policy implications are radical – it advocates what the authors call “libertarian paternalism”. This paradoxical prescription is based on the idea of ‘choice architecture’ – the notion that the […]