The employment tribunal ruling that Uber drivers are employees rather than being self-employed sub-contractors has major implications for the development of the labour market. Much evidence suggests that there has been a large growth of employment in the-so-called 'gig economy', where a firm puts workers in direct contact with clients to undertake specific one-off tasks (or 'gigs'). The firm acting as co-ordinator between workers and clients arranges the gig - and is often assisted by technology in doing this - and takes a commission for doing so. Hence, in the case of Uber, a passenger uses her digital device to arrange a journey, and Uber's software is used to find a possible driver. Till now, the drivers have been considered to be self-employed.

Working in the gig economy offers advantages and disadvantages. Work arrangements can be very flexible. But as self-employed workers, many of the protections available to employees have been absent. So, for example, gig economy workers cannot access sick pay unless they make insurance arrangements themselves - and there are moral hazard reasons why this might be difficult. Likewise they are likely to have to make their own pension arrangements. If they are available for work at a time when no work is offered, they may in effect be paid below the minimum wage. For some workers, involvement in the gig economy supplements a more regular job. For others, the main source of income is the gig economy. And for this latter group, the lack of job security can be a problem.

It is, however, a problem not only for the individual worker, but for the economy more generally. If workers do not have a long term engagement with an employer, they are likely to lack the structures that have conventionally accompanied a job - in particular training, development and progression. While some parts of the gig economy involve highly skilled work - freelance journalism, or business consultancy, for example - others less so - and here driving is a classic example. In the absence of a career structure, workers will lack the opportunity to develop to their full potential, and, for the economy as a whole, this creates a productivity gap. If the future of work is increasingly characterised by a looser set of ties between employers and employees, institutions other than the employer will be needed to provide the mechanisms that ensure development, progression and productivity enhancement. Membership organisations may be one way in which this role can be fulfilled. Unions are one example, accreditation bodies are another.

The finding of the employment tribunal will raise Uber's costs and this in turn will diminish its competitive advantage. If Uber can survive this, then its employees will benefit from the new employment security that they will enjoy. Otherwise, Uber may not be able to operate in the UK.

In this digital age, however, solutions similar to Uber, possibly operated from other legal jurisdictions, would be sure to emerge to fill the gap. While the tribunal ruling shifts the responsibility for employment security onto the employer in this case - and while many other gig economy businesses will need to consider the ruling carefully - a more comprehensive solution may be to look to other institutions than the employer to provide workers with security, development, progression and productivity enhancement.

Following an encouraging showing in July, the latest industrial production figures, up to August of this year, indicate a fall in production over the month. Year-on-year, the data show an increase of some 0.8%. Nevertheless, analysing these data using my neural network forecaster continues to show that a dip in the data is likely over the coming months.

The outcome of Brexit negotiations is, of course, as yet unknown, and the reliability of any forecast of industrial production in this context is likely to be unusually limited.

The months of campaigning are over, and the majority of those voting in the Brexit referendum have determined that the UK should leave the EU. The campaigning period was seen by many to be frustrating, not least because neither side succeeded in engaging fully with the concerns of the other - it became less of a debate than a shouting match.

On the Remain side, the economic costs of Brexit were emphasised. It will now be necessary to ensure that these costs are kept to a minimum. The resignation of David Cameron as prime minister will serve to prolong the period of uncertainty following the referendum, and does not help in this respect. Still, the new government will need to decide what model of trade the UK should pursue in the future. There are three main options. First, we could join the European Economic Area (the 'Norway' option). This is attractive in that it would provide least turbulence. Businesses could quickly return to a relatively risk-free environment, and we could expect investment, and hence the economy, to recover fairly quickly from the shock. Secondly, we could negotiate a free trade agreement (similar to that which Canada is close to completing with the EU - the 'Canada' option). This would be more limited in scope than the Norway option, and probably would not greatly help our service industries. It would also take many years to negotiate. Thirdly, we could simply trade under WTO rules. This would mean that our exports to the EU would be subject to the common external tariff unless special arrangements can be made. It would therefore be the most damaging option.

While the Norway option has some appeal, it also suffers a major drawback. The campaign to leave brought to the fore some major concerns that the public has about immigration. The Norway option would require the UK to continue to allow the free movement of labour between EU member states and itself. Here, however, a possibility suggests itself. The deal negotiated by David Cameron earlier this year allowed, within the rules of the single market, a temporary brake to be applied to benefit payments to EU migrants entering the UK. Such a temporary brake could, in principle, be applied also directly to migration without breaching any new principle. This would allow migration from the EU to the UK to continue (over the brake period) only subject to a points mechanism. Hence control over borders could be enhanced. The duration of the brake period would need to be subject to negotiation, but a lengthy brake should serve to reduce concerns about immigration, while not breaching any principle of the single market. It is likely that, even in the politically sensitive environment that we have now entered, the UK could find allies in the EU in the context of this cause.

This is important, not least because the time that it would take to negotiate a Canada option means that the Norway option is a likely outcome, at minimum as a staging post. Yet it is an option that would, as things stand, leave many voters feeling that they have been cheated - unless a migration brake, or something similar, could be negotiated. In an ideal world our government would already be discussing options with Brussels - though the reality that we are in a period of leadership transition may make that difficult.

And yet, while immigration turned out to be a key issue, we should not lose sight of the fact that areas of the country with most EU migration are amongst those where the remain sentiment is strongest. Concerns about immigration are really just a reflection of a much deeper concern - about the distance that has grown between the political establishment and the people. We have woken today to a fractured Britain. Healing that break requires a reinvention of our political structures. Genuine devolution of powers might help. A reassessment, within the major political parties, of how they should connect with their natural constituencies, may help more - but whether they can rise to that challenge remains to be seen.

Industrial production rose slightly from February to March, but the higher baseline figure from a year ago means that output in this sector has nevertheless fallen over the past year, by some 0.3%. The March data confirm that, for the second successive quarter, production has declined. This means, in effect, that the industrial sector is in recession. My forecasting model (see graph below) suggests that the slowdown is likely to continue for some time.

Manufacturing comprises most of the output in the production industries, and has been in the doldrums for some considerable time. Output in this sector is now some 2.2% below the level achieved at its post-recession peak at the beginning of 2012 - and is indeed no higher than was achieved in April 1989. The recovery remains dangerously unbalanced.

The rapid increase in life expectancy has led to ageing being regarded as one of the major policy challenges facing governments. Policies to encourage savings include Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), and the new Lifetime ISA and Help to Save initiatives. At the same time, auto-enrollment in pensions schemes is being rolled out so that, by 2019, pension contributions amounting to 8% of salary will be made on behalf of all employees (unless they opt out). This 8% is widely believed to be too low a figure.

As well as providing incentives to save more, policy has been aimed at lengthening working lives. The age at which workers qualify for the state pension is being raised gradually, and in 2011 the concept of a default retirement age was scrapped.

These two solutions - saving more and working longer - are often seen as the only two options available in paying for the increased burden of an ageing population. But there may be a third.

If productivity were to rise, the additional output produced by those in work could be used to pay for some of the extra cost burden - in terms of both care and pensions - implied by ageing. In the long run, this could be done through private savings and insurance. In the short and medium term, however, it would involve some redistribution from the generation of working age people to that of retirees. That would need to be done through the tax system. (That is a transitory and technical requirement, not an expression of a preference for solutions from the political left.)

Suggesting increased productivity as a solution may appear curious at a time when the economy is still suffering from a stagnation in productivity - the so-called productivity puzzle. But there is reason to believe that productivity growth might come back.

If ageing is one challenge that society has to learn to face, another is the rapid advance of technology. Some researchers predict that almost a half of all jobs are at risk of becoming defunct owing to the steady march of the robots. If true, adapting to that is certainly a challenge - though past experience suggests that jobs morph as technology advances. What is certain is that rapid technological advance should bring about massive changes in productivity - why else would the technology be adopted?

We certainly need to plan for longer lives through saving more and working longer. But, faced by the two challenges of ageing and rapid technological change, we might just find that one can become a solution to the other. And - to reiterate - fully to take advantage of this opportunity when it comes, we must be lithe in our thinking around what is acceptable in the arena of taxation and redistribution.

The Treasury has published an analysis of the economic costs associated with Brexit. A range of estimates is given, with different values attached to different assumptions about the nature of trading arrangements made with other countries after the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. The central estimate that has attracted most media interest is a prediction that the costs will amount to 6.2% of Gross Domestic Product. This is a substantial figure - huge in relation to other analyses such as those undertaken by Open Europe which estimated a los of 0.8% of GDP on the most plausible scenario. This warrants further interrogation.

The Treasury investigates three options for the post-Brexit world. One is for the UK to negotiate a Norway-style arrangment whereby free trade with the EU is maintained but, while no longer being a member state, the UK continues to make payments to the EU. The second is the the UK to negotiate a Canada-style Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the EU. This does not cover services - which represent some 80% of UK output - and would not allow the benefits of free movement of labour. The third option considered is a 'clean break' where no special arrangement is made between the UK and EU, but trade continues under World Trade Organisation rules. The estimated loss, as a percentage of GDP, for each of these options is 3.8%, 6.2% and 7.5%. It is the 3.8% estimate that most closely corresponds to Open Economy's 0.8% figure - and clearly the gap between the two is large.

The key question that emerges from consideration of these figures, then, is this: why are the figures, particularly those for the first option in which free trade with the EU in both goods and services is maintained, so much larger than other estimates in the literature? The Open Europe analysis is based on a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. This type of modelling approach examines comparative statics - in essence it compares an equilibrium position 'before' and 'after' a change - and is calibrated using estimates of key parameters that the received literature suggests are plausible. This is good for providing a long run comparison, but it is likely to understate costs that are due to adjustment between the 'before' and 'after' positions. By way of contrast, the Treasury approach employs a statistical analysis based on a gravity model. In this framework, pairs of countries that are both members of a trading partnership such as the EU can be identified using dummy variables, and the importance of such joint membership vis-a-vis, say European Economic Area (EEA) membership, can be assessed. Since there are few observations for countries that are in EEA but not in the EU, there is likely to be some imprecision in the estimates of the costs associated with the 'Norway option'.

The uncertainties surrounding any predictions of this kind are substantial. But the main message to come out of the various exercises should not be minimised. The long run costs of Brexit, even under the kindest assumptions about what regime will follow, are large albeit not prohibitive. The costs of getting from here to there are larger. Those advocating that the UK should leave the EU need to be aware that the years following Brexit would be a bumpy ride, that even in the long term there are non-negligible costs, and that they therefore expect people to value really highly whatever gains they are seeking - just how highly, they need to spell out. At this stage, it is not clear that the Leave camp is offering much beyond bluster.

The latest data on industrial production show a drop of 0.5% over the year to February. This is further evidence of an economic slowdown. While overall growth is still positive, this is entirely due to expansion in the services sector - and we know that confidence in that sector too has fallen sharply in recent months.

I have, for several years, used the industrial production data in a neural network forecasting model. The latest forecasts of this model, updated to include the data released today, appear below. They continue to indicate that the next year will be challenging for the production sector, with continued falls in output.

Two news stories have made reference to a trend for people increasingly to shop 'little and often'. One is the rising sales figures of the Co-op supermarkets, and the other is the decision by Sainsbury's to scrap its brand match scheme (which requires customers to purchase at least 10 items in order to claim the refund).

The 'little and often' trend is evidenced by the rapid growth of convenience stores vis-a-vis larger supermarkets in recent years. This may be partly demand led, following changes in consumer habits during and after the recession, but issues on the supply side are likely to have played a part too. Smaller convenience stores with less than 280m² of floorspace face less stringent Sunday trading restrictions, for example, and the proliferation of such stores has much to do with legal considerations of this kind.

Whether the demand for 'little and often' reflects a permanent shift in customer behaviour remains to be seen. If new technology lowers further the fixed costs of shopping (with automated tills reducing queueing time, for example), 'little and often' becomes more appealing. Likewise, the squeeze on space imposed by high property prices in London (especially) makes 'little and often' an appealing strategy, particularly in connection with bulky low-value items (such as toilet rolls, for example).

Is there, then, a future for the larger stores? Certainly if trading restrictions were eventually to be lifted, they would be able to compete on a more level playing field. And, particularly in parts of the country where space is less of a consideration for consumers, they should remain well placed. The 'little and often' trend is not necessarily a permanent feature - and, like so much of what we see around us, it has its underpinnings in the economic forces of supply and demand.

The June 1978 conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has attained legendary status in the economic profession. The revolution that has transformed macroeconomics into an area of research that is solidly built on microeconomic foundations – with optimising agents making decisions that are consistent in the context of an intertemporal setting – is said to have taken place then. Certainly, the language in the paper presented by Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent, and in the response by Robert Solow, brings to mind a coup.

While Lucas and Sargent represented a new broom, the revolution turned out to be a slow burner. Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott published their seminal work on aggregate fluctuations in 1982. This built on earlier work by Lucas in its emphasis on microfoundations, but introduced for the first time a method – calibration – whereby empirical flesh could be built upon the theoretical bones. Calibration met with some initial scepticism within the profession. In its crudest forms, it has a back-of-the-envelope quality about it. But, as a slow burner, the methods became increasingly refined over time. The early real business cycle models developed into modern dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models.

These models initially had a market clearing orientation – economic theories often do because it’s easier to model things that way. Inevitably, however, as the research agenda matured, mechanisms were found to incorporate more realistic scenarios. One of these, due to Jordi Gali, is an imperfectly competitive setting in which endogenous fluctuations in market power lead to sustained variation in prices and output over time. Other models have built upon developments in the theory of pricing by Guillermo Calvo and Julio Rotemberg . An example is provided by Michael Woodford (in chapter 3 of his classic book). The variety of DSGE models that incorporate rigidities and other market imperfections provide a suite of New Keynesian (NK) approaches to modern macroeconomic modelling.

These models are at the ‘rocket science’ end of economics. Consumers (who are also workers) and firms are modelled in as simple a way as possible by focusing on ‘representative agents’ – the optimising behaviour of one typical consumer and one typical firm is modelled rather than taking into account the heterogeneity that we see around us in the world. Nevertheless the optimising problems that the analyst needs to solve on behalf of these agents are complex – they must choose the actions that maximise their dynamic returns over a time horizon, rationally forming their expectations of future prices and outcomes, where these are determined both by their own time paths of decisions and those of the other actors in the model.

These theories have emerged alongside massive improvements in computational capacity. The development of open source software - Dynare - has helped make DSGE models accessible to large numbers of macroeconomists, allowing standard models to be tweaked and also allowing empirical evaluation, and surely accounting in large measure for the popularity of the new techniques. DSGE models came to be widely used in central banks during the late 1990s, initially alongside traditional macroeconomic forecasting models, and arguably before the models were sufficiently mature to be used in a policy-making context. Indeed, it was only in the early part of the last decade that it became clear amongst academic economists that the methods introduced by the revolution had indeed become the new core of macroeconomics.

While their use has become the norm in the context of macroeconomic analysis, DSGE models are not very useful in other settings. As a labour economist, I am interested in unemployment, discrimination and inequality. Representative agent models are not equipped for analysing any of these, since they assume all workers to be identical. So ‘unemployment’ in these models takes the form of (all) workers voluntarily choosing to work fewer hours in some periods rather than others as they substitute effort intertemporally in order to take advantage of changing incentives. As a definition of unemployment, that is, frankly and obviously, ridiculous. Indeed, the representative agent model has been widely criticised for this. Recent developments with heterogeneous agents might help, but DSGE still looks far from being the tool of choice to analyse labour markets.

As they have grown in sophistication, it has become clear that confronting these models with the empirics is essential. Complicated models may have the advantage of taking more of the features of the world in which we live into account, but they tend to lead to no conclusion without empirics – anything goes, and there are circumstances where counterintuitive results are possible. At some point, indeed, these models lose sight of what it is to be a model – a model should be simple, it should be unrealistic, it should exist to help us understand, not to obfuscate.

Given these changes in how we do economics, teaching beginning students of macroeconomics has become a considerable challenge. Modern macroeconomic models are not things that beginning students are equipped to face – they draw on difficult concepts of dynamic optimisation and expectations formation, where these are exercised by numerous agents simultaneously. While they can be expressed in the form of a ‘dynamic IS curve’ and a ‘Phillips curve’, it is only with some hesitation and reservation that one would draw an analogy between these and the IS curves and Phillips curves of the theory pre-revolution. Perhaps an understanding of the old approaches to macroeconomics are a prerequisite for understanding the new. But it seems perverse, and potentially confusing to students, to teach economics using methods that, later in the curriculum, we then criticise – yet build the new on what might be the shaky foundations of the old. On the other hand, beginning with the traditional models of ISLM and aggregate supply / aggregate demand would have the advantage of offering a ready reckoner – one that, for all the arguments of the revolutionaries, still has considerable merit.

I have as yet no answers to this dilemma, and, from my examination of new initiatives in economic pedagogy (such as CORE) I’m not persuaded that anyone else does either. Here is a space to be filled.

Output in the production industries bounced back in January, growing by 0.2% over its level a year earlier. This follows a 0.1% fall a month earlier. The forecast shown below suggests that the series is likely to return to negative territory soon, however.

Further evidence that the production sector has entered, and is likely to remain in, a period of slowdown comes from examination of the baseline data - in 2015, the value of the production index for most months over the spring and early summer was somewhat higher than in January of that year, and this means that it will be difficult for industrial production in the first half of 2016 to match that observed in 2015.

While the performance of the production industries - and in particular manufacturing - has been muted over recent months, the service sector - which of course accounts for around 80% of the UK's Gross Domestic Product - has been growing at a reasonably healthy pace. We are nevertheless likely to be nearer the next recession than the last one, and sustaining the current rate of growth into 2017 and beyond is a challenge. The Chancellor of the Exchequer should give this serious consideration in framing the fiscal stance for next week's Budget.

The latest data on industrial production show a dip, year on year, in output to December 2015. This amounts to -0.3% across all production industries, but the fall is particularly pronounced in manufacturing - at 1.8%. As observers of my forecaster of this series will know, this downturn has been on the cards for some time.

The latest forecast is reproduced below. It looks ahead 24 months, and suggests that the production industries will not recover quickly.

There are clearly many uncertainties facing the economy at present - these include the prospect of Brexit raised by the upcoming referendum on EU membership, but also weaknesses in the global economy with China, in particular, facing an unfamiliar problem of sluggish growth. In the UK, the (dominant) services sector has been growing at a steady pace for some time, but confidence there is showing some signs of fragility. While many will be hoping for a soft landing rather than a return to full blown recession, the signs are that a significant slowdown has already begun.

The latest industrial production statistics indicate continued growth in production. Compared with a year earlier, production in November 2015 was a little under 1% higher. This is, however, in spite of a large fall of 1.3% in manufacturing - the largest component of industrial production. This fall was compensated for by a substantial increase in other sectors, notably including oil and gas extraction.

I have regularly used these statistics to provide forecasts using a simple neural network programme. The latest forecasts, with the red line looking ahead 24 months, appear below. They continue to evidence some fragility in the production sector, with a dip in overall output over the coming period looking increasingly likely.

The labour market statistics released today present a very rosy picture of the continuing recovery. Unemployment is down sharply, by 110000, to 5.2%. The gains in employment have been spread across various groups - with marked increase in the numbers of full-time employees (up 80000), part-time employees (up 66000) and full-time self-employed workers (up 75000). The largest gains have been in construction (up 77000 over the three months to September), but there have also been large gains in professional, scientific and technical services, and in administrative services.

After a subdued period earlier in the year, vacancies are now once again on the rise. This provides further evidence of a reinvigorated labour market.

On pay, the story remains subdued, however - indeed, increasingly so. Total pay in October averaged just 1.9% higher than a year earlier, this figure being down from 2.1% in September. In construction, however, reflecting the recent rapid expansion of the sector, pay has continued to steam ahead - at a remarkable 6.6%.

The overall picture, then, indicates healthy development. The main question mark surrounds how pay can be nudged up so that workers feel the benefit of recovery. The hike in the minimum wage will, at least in a mechanical way, help, but the real issue remains one of improving productivity.

Recent debate surrounding the UK's participation in the Syrian conflict has brought to the surface some interesting views about the motives of politicians making key decisions. Some argue that politicians have a vested interest in fostering conflict and hence boosting the defence related industries. 'Follow the money' has become a favourite phrase of the cynics.

Serious literature of relevance to this has produced ambiguous findings, but most reliable estimates range from a negative through a negligible effect of military spending on economic growth. So the view that, as a general rule, a politician might vote for war if standing to benefit from ownership of defence related companies ignores the fact that the same politician would be better off owning a broad portfolio and voting against conflict.

There has doubtless been much wrong about the way in which the West has dealt with the situation in the Middle East. For sure, the web of alliances that has been woven is tangled indeed. But some of the wilder and more cynical views currently doing the rounds belong in the world of conspiracy theories - and as such are much less convincing than cock-up as explanations of what we observe.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been widely lauded for pulling rabbits out of a hat in his Autumn Statement. For sure, the familiar conjuring trick requires admirable sleight of hand, and the Statement has evidence aplenty of that.

The headlines in today's newspapers suggest that austerity has ended. The figures do not quite align with that view, but the extent of cutbacks at least appears to have moderated somewhat. The Chancellor's largesse, or what some have termed 'less awfulness', has been enabled by four things.

First, he has been helped by a forecast boost to the public finances. The £27 billion windfall is spread over a 5 year period and therefore represents a relatively small proportion of the gap that the Chancellor wishes to close. In any event, economic developments over the coming period may make the saving somewhat softer than it at first appears.

Secondly, the implementation of the welfare cap - part of the Chancellor's famous and ill-conceived fiscal charter - has been delayed in order to reverse the decision to cut tax credits.

Thirdly, several charges best interpreted as stealth taxes have been introduced. This includes a levy on businesses to pay for apprenticeships and the introduction of a scheme that will allow local councils to raise their taxes by 2% to pay for costs of social care. These things are certainly desirable, and the changes are welcome inasmuch as they secure continued services - but the Chancellor has nonetheless shifted the cost from central government to other payers. As far as the public is concerned, this takes with one hand what is given with the other.

Fourthly, the Chancellor has coonverted several grants schemes - in the areas of business support, health training, and further and higher education - into loans schemes. Again this may allow central government taxes to stay low, but the costs must nevertheless be paid.

In sum, therefore, this was a very clever Autumn Statment. The Chancellor certainly did succeed in pulling rabbits out of hats. But a wise audience knows that - just as is typically the case with magicians - he has made liberal use of smoke and mirrors.

The latest labour market statisitcs paint something of a puzzling picture. There has, over the last quarter, been a substantial fall in unemployment - the figure for July through September is 103000 lower than in the previous three months. That is clearly good news.

But when we come to look at where the gains have come, the picture is distinctly mixed. There has been a huge increase of 177000 in employment. Most of this, however, some 145000, is in part-time jobs. The age distribution of the gains in employment is also a feature of the data - all the gain is observed in the older age group, 50 years of age and above. Consistent with the employment gains being concentrated in part-time work, average hours worked have continued to fall.

The news on pay is also indicative of a market that has started to slow. Comparing weekly earnings in September 2015 with those a year earlier, pay growth slowed to 2.0% (from 3.2% last month). It is difficult to attribute this to any sector-specific factors - the slowdown appears to be fairly even across industries.

In sum, the news on the unemployment rate is, at first blush, something that should offer good cheer, but the underlying figures offer very little comfort.

The latest statistics on industrial production have been released, and confirm that output in the production industries has continued to grow in the year to September. The forecasts of my neural network model for this series continues, however, to suggest that caution is warranted in interpreting recent growth as a harbinger of continued expansion. A dip is due. That may not carry over into the (much larger) part of the economy that is based in services, but, particularly at a time when global demand appears to be weakening, we should be wary of overoptimism.

The latest industrial production statistics have been released, and show growth of 1.9% over the year to August. The seasonally adjusted figures also show an increase of almost 1% over the month. This seems very encouraging.

Applying my neural network forecasting model to these data suggests that the recovery in industrial production may continue for a few months, but there are warning signs that it may not be sustained beyond that.

The model on which these forecasts are based is very simple and does not include information about policies that are known to be in the offing. We know, however, that fiscal retrenchment is set to toughen over the coming period. These forecasts suggest that the economy, looking ahead, is somewhat more fragile than it has been over the last year, and that caution should be exercised in judging the desirable speed of further fiscal contraction.

The political aftermath of this year’s general election looks set to be played out over an extended period. However this point, 100 days after the election, seems to be an appropriate time to provide an early analysis of the economic dimension of the new administration’s performance. The election confirmed the positions of many key players – David Cameron and George Osborne are still in residence in Downing Street – but the change from coalition to majority Conservative rule has freed the government of some constraints. In many respects, then, this is indeed a new government.

The economic importance of this political change was evidenced by the second Budget of the year. The Chancellor took the opportunity to introduce a new wave of government spending cuts, many of which would have been difficult to implement within a coalition. His plans to reduce the deficit sharply were blown off course after 2012, and this year’s Budgets have provided renewed impetus to the austerity drive. The March Budget was criticised for its rollercoaster properties - implying as it did a severe downswing in government spending before a pre-election upswing. In the Summer Budget these fluctuations were smoothed out, and the period over which the deficit is to be removed was extended. These are welcome developments, restoring some sense to the time profile of fiscal retrenchment. But the impact on growth of the spending cuts that will be imposed over the next couple of years will need to be monitored carefully, and policy should be adjusted in line with this impact if need be.

The broader macroeconomic context has continued to develop reasonably favourably, with output growth looking to be on course for around 2.5% over the year. Meanwhile, inflation has been subdued. This has been largely the result of falling oil prices (nothing to do with the government), and the short period earlier this year when, on average, prices were falling does not look set to trigger a harmful and sustained deflation. Indeed this period of low price inflation has allowed real wages to rise for the first time in several years.

Whether this increase in earnings reflects a much needed upturn in labour productivity remains to be seen. Shortly after the Summer Budget, the government published Fixing the Foundations, its plan to restore productivity. This contains some good ideas around employer-led training, the role of universities in developing human capital and innovative capacity, transport, digital infrastructure, and housing investment. It is certainly the case that investment is needed across the full range of economic activities in the country in order to secure productivity gains. Business investment is critical, and encouraging such investment requires a stable environment which is difficult to guarantee in present circumstances – given in particular the recent trauma of the Eurozone centred on Greece and the uncertainty surrounding a British referendum on continued membership of the EU.

While the commitment to supporting investment in infrastructure is welcome, less pleasing has been the government’s ability to turn this commitment into reality. Major investments in upgrading the rail network have been ‘paused’, leading many to fear that they might ultimately be scrapped. In the North of England, in particular, this has severely challenged the government’s own concept of the Northern Powerhouse, and some considerably clearer thinking around this (and indeed around other aspects of regional devolution) is urgently needed.

Economic opinion is divided about whether the cuts announced in the Summer Budget come at a better time for the UK macroeconomy than did those introduced in 2010. But whatever one’s view on that, it is certainly the case that the microeconomic effects of the current round of cuts will attract attention. In particular, the distributional effects will need monitoring closely, with large cuts being made to the welfare budget. This being so, it is highly regrettable, indeed shameful, that the Treasury will no longer publish a distributional analysis of the effects of policy. This is a step back. An important future measure of this government’s economic performance will be how the poorest have fared – and it is too early yet to come to any conclusions on that.

For a variety of reasons, there has been an increased concentration of low wage workers in the UK. Most significantly, technology is leading to a polarisation of jobs, with concentrations at the top and bottom ends of the skill and wage distribution. Many lower skill workers have been employed at wages below the Living Wage, and this has imposed costs on the welfare system. The Chancellor’s announcement in the Summer Budget of a new Living Wage (at a level between the existing national minimum wage and the Living Wage) should encourage employers to address the issue of productivity amongst their lowest paid workers, and should reduce the burden imposed on the welfare state by low pay. Whether this alone can be sufficient to address the large trends that have caused the problem of low pay in the first place is, however, moot. The impact of technology on the labour market, just like the impact of the ageing workforce, requires some big thinking, not just in government. That has yet to surface.

Returning to the overall macroeconomic picture, the Chancellor’s imposition, in normal times, of a ‘fiscal lock’ – limiting his own room for manoeuvre in spending and tax decisions – is unfortunate. It seems to reflect a view on the government’s part that its primary economic objective should be to balance its own books. Over the long run, it is certainly important that the government should not accumulate debts that are unsustainable. But, as someone once observed, in the long run we are all dead, and in the shorter run it is vital that the government should retain for itself discretion over all the levers of influence on the economy. Maybe, though, the definition of what makes for normal times will turn out to mean that the fiscal lock amounts to little beyond the hype. The early abandonment of 2018-19 as the target date for clearing the deficit certainly suggests as much. As he showed in 2012 when easing back on austerity, the Chancellor’s practice is generally markedly more sensible than his rhetoric.

Overall, then, the first 100 days have seen quite a lot of action in the economic sphere. The government’s policy will evolve, surely, as events unfold. There have been positives – smoothing out the rollercoaster, the new Living Wage – but there remain some very real concerns, particularly around the distributional impact of policy and the climate of uncertainty surrounding a possible Brexit. When all is said and done, 100 days is just that. The horizon over which these policies will ultimately be judged is much longer.

The latest statistics on industrial production show a dip in output over the month to June of this year. Nevertheless, inputting these data into my neural network forecaster indicates that year-on-year movements in this series can be expected to be somewhat more positive than forecasts have indicated in the past. The rate of growth can be expected to slow, but the imminent danger of this series turning into negative territory appears to be receding somewhat.