The Macroeconomic Cost of Conservative Government

By Simon Wren-Lewis, June 11, 2024

Simon Wren-Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford.

During this election period there has been plenty of analysis that looks at how the economy has performed since 2010 (the IFS here for example). All show the UK performing very badly indeed. But how much is that down to macroeconomic policy mistakes, and how much is due to factors outside the government’s control? I will attempt to answer that question in this post, and try to be as conservative as possible.

I will begin with austerity, because it’s a calculation I have already done. The table below is taken from this post.

The first row comes from an analysis done by the OBR (Chart E on page 27). The main negative impact on growth came in the first two years as public investment was cut back sharply, but continuing fiscal consolidation in later years reduced aggregate demand by significant amounts. The key issue is how persistent these impacts are. To see what persistence means in this context, consider a hypothetical example.

Suppose cuts in public investment in 2010 reduce GDP in that year by 1%. Public investment stays at this lower level in 2011. Other things being equal, does GDP stay 1% lower in 2011, or do other components of demand rise to take the place of some of that lower public investment? In normal circumstances the answer to that question would be the latter, because central banks would react to lower GDP by cutting interest rates which would stimulate private spending. However throughout the period examined above interest rates were at their lower bound, so this couldn’t happen. But other factors (e.g. Quantitative Easing) may have crowded in private demand to some extent.

In this calculation I assumed that the impact of fiscal consolidation decayed by a factor of 0.8 each year. The third row therefore gives the impact of austerity on the level of GDP in each year over this period. For example, the OBR estimate there was no fiscal consolidation in 2017/18, so the impact of past austerity on the level of GDP in that year is to lower GDP by 2.1% x 0.8=1.7%. In theory austerity would have had some impact after 2017/18, but interest rates started rising at the end of 2017, suggesting that the Bank thought there was no longer much deficient demand.

However it is also likely that the earlier prolonged period of deficient demand had an impact on how much the UK economy can supply. I examined this here. The argument is that productivity improving investment was lost during the austerity period, and that had a longer lasting impact on UK productivity and the stock of capital. The problem here is attaching numbers to this idea. Empirical estimates can sometimes be very large (for example here), and the IMF study I looked at here I looked at here is also consistent with austerity (fiscal consolidation in a recession) having significant long term impacts on GDP. But I want these estimates to be conservative, so I will assume that austerity during the 2010-17 period reduced GDP permanently by 1.5%.

The OBR estimate that Brexit will end up reducing UK GDP by 4%. However I need more than just a long run impact. The following is based on a NIESR study by Kaya et al, and in particular their Table TF4. (I’ve done some extrapolation for the initial years.)

Again I suspect this is quite a conservative estimate for the immediate impact of Brexit, even though their long run impact (at -5.7% for 2035) is greater than the OBR’s number.

We also need to add something for the pandemic. The UK was hit in 2020 comparatively hard, both in terms of deaths and lost GDP, even though other countries like Italy were hit earlier. Not only did Johnson’s government waste the early months of 2020 with the idea of ‘herd immunity’, but it also waited far too long in introducing lockdowns, which meant when those lockdowns inevitably came they were more severe and prolonged, giving a more sustained hit to GDP. UK GDP fell by over 10% in 2020, compared to just over 6% in the Euro area. I think it is fair to class this as an economic mistake, because the reason the government gave for delaying lockdowns was to protect the economy, whereas in reality they were doing the opposite.

The third and last lockdown extended into 2021. In addition, the failure of the government to give the NHS the resources to bring waiting lists down after the pandemic, coupled with the steady squeeze in health funding that preceded it, began to have a clear macroeconomic impact during the 2020s. While labour force participation returned to its pre-pandemic trend in most other countries, it did not in the UK, and a significant part of that was due to poor health.

The table below collects these three elements together.

From 2011 until 2019 households were over 2% poorer mainly as a result of austerity, but with additions from Brexit after the referendum. By 2024 that had increased to being 5% poorer, mainly because of Brexit. That means that the average household was losing over £4,000 worth of resources (public and private consumption plus investment [1]) in 2024 as a direct result of government decisions. The Conservatives like to accumulate these things, so adding up the losses over all fifteen years comes to (in today’s prices) a massive £35,000 loss of resources for the average household.

Is there any way of comparing these numbers with the UK's actual performance, either compared to history or other countries. Comparing GDP per capita growth to a trend growth line based on post-war data would give a much bigger gap, but that comparison is misleading because there were signs UK growth was slowing down before the financial crisis, and this fits with a gradual reduction in underlying growth in other countries. Unfortunately all the major economies beside China undertook austerity from 2010, so international comparison are little help here.

However, John Springford has compared growth in the UK since 2016 with a doppelgänger based on other countries, and he estimates the UK has grown by 5% less than these other countries suggest it should. If we combine my estimate for 2024 for Brexit and post-pandemic health we get 3.5%, which given the uncertainties involved is consistent with Springford's analysis. 

A UK government that enacts policies that reduce GDP by around 2% during its time in office is pretty unusual. To reduce it by 5% is extraordinary, but then since WWII we haven’t had a government that has cut public spending in a recession when interest rates were stuck near zero, or one that deliberately raised trade barriers with our largest market.

The way these numbers are constructed it looks like the consequences of three bad mistakes, but I think it goes deeper than that. What connects them all is crass economic incompetence. In each case expertise was ignored because it didn’t fit in with ideological or political objectives. As I have sometimes said, mistakes made by politicians because they have followed the expert consensus are understandable and to some extent forgivable, but mistakes made because politicians ignore the expert consensus have to be owned by those politicians.

This propensity of Conservative governments to ignore the economic consensus and as a result make very costly mistakes is not unique to this period, as my recent discussion of monetarism showed. What is really alarming is the failure to learn from these mistakes, or even recognise them as mistakes. This isn’t just the natural reluctance of politicians to admit error, but goes far deeper. The Conservatives have created through the right wing press, pressure on the BBC, think tanks and rich donors an alternative reality for themselves, where disasters are seen as triumphs never to be questioned. Which is why in this election they are plugging tax cuts despite crippled public services, refusing to recognise the costs of Brexit and where even the delayed pandemic lockdowns are seen as a mistake.

As a result, as things stand any future Conservative government will be likely to continue to make serious economic policy errors that cost most UK households a substantial amount in lost income and resources.

Footnotes

[1] The idea of household resources (GDP divided by the number of households) is less familiar than, say, household income, but in my view it is a better measure of underlying welfare. It includes, for example, public services like the NHS, which household income does not. It is of course just the household equivalent of GDP per capita.