Date: Wednesday, 13 February 2019
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Thomas Pope
Talk Title: ‘’The Changing State and the 2019 Spending Review’’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar in the series on the Economics of Austerity, will be held on 13 February 2019. Thomas Pope will give a talk on “The Changing State and the 2019 Spending Review”. The seminar will be held in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Speaker:
Thomas Pope is a Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Thomas works in the tax sector. His main areas of interest include firm investment and the effects of the tax system on large and small businesses. He also works on the public finances

Talkover:
Later this year we should hear the outcome of the spending review – arguably the most important non-Brexit related decision of this parliament. A decade after the financial crisis we are still experiencing its consequences in much lower living standards than we might have expected and also in much lower levels of government spending. After facing the biggest deficit in peacetime history, since
2010 the government has implemented the biggest set of spending cuts since at least the 1940s. Yet in many ways governments since 2010 have followed exactly the priorities of previous administrations such that health is taking an ever growing fraction of all spending. Thomas Pope will trace the changes in public finances and public spending, set out some of the options and challenges in the forthcoming spending review, as well as looking at opposition policy. He will argue that future pressures on public spending are unlikely to be accommodated unless the size of the state finally grows or our demands on it change dramatically.

Please contact the seminar organisers
Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (mk24@cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query