The UK's regional imbalances. The lab monkey trade gap. Lindsay Graham on power & squatting in Hong Kong.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
Boot Shop Sign c. 1937 Alice Stearns
Greek tragedy: how does weak regional growth affect the wider UK economy? Paul Swinney
A number of UK regions have a poorer fiscal position than Greece at its worst. Figure 1 plots the difference between taxes raised and money spent in each UK region as a share of its economic output. Outside London and the South East (sometimes called the Greater South East), all run deficits that are higher than the national average. Four regions – the North East, Northern Ireland, Wales and the West Midlands – have deficits that make Greece’s position look modest.
This is getting worse, not better. London’s subsidy to the rest of the country is now larger, relative to its own economy, than at any point on record. In 2024/25, London exported a fiscal surplus worth 8% (£49 billion) of its own output – about £5,400 per Londoner – to the rest of the country. The usual political complaint is that London takes too much. On this measure, the opposite is the case.
Source: Economics Observatory
What conclusion would you draw from the trajectory of wealth inequality in the UK over the long-run? The most obvious one, surely, is that social democracy worked, but was then stopped in its tracks. As a result, the tendency towards greater equality went into reverse (mildly).
HEY READERS,
THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day.
I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button.
Photo by Jakub Dziubak on Unsplash
If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $60. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to.
Emerging-market debt shocks: How Sri Lanka, Zambia got into trouble and how South Africa and Egypt may be at risk too.
For contributing subscribers only.
We spend all our time talking about rare earths. We don’t pay enough attention to the trade dynamics in laboratory monkeys.
Alice Stearns, Hardware Shop Sign 1937
“There is no they” (Lindsey Graham)
Open Books Hong Kong
Source: Open Books HK
This book reveals how Hong Kong, after decades of failing to resolve the “squatter problem,” finally succeeded in ending new squatting after 1984.1 It has also gradually decreased the numbers of squatters from a peak of about 750,000 in 1982 (Figure 1.1), although there are still over 200,000.2 This might seem to some a marginal topic, but that would neglect the global and local consequences of squatting. Globally, there are over 1 billion squatters (Neuwirth 2005), and the numbers may be continuing to rise, with immense consequences in diverse policy domains. Locally, we will demonstrate how the management of Hong Kong’s squatters and squatter areas has played a major role in structuring the kind of landscape, government, and society that emerged in the four decades after 1949.
Source: Open Books HK
Shaker Infirmary Cap c. 1936 Alice Stearns
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: