IEA Podcast

Covid-19 is threatening lives and economies across the globe. 

As the UK government enforces social distancing to slow the spread of the virus, a sharp slowdown in economic activity is not only inevitable but necessary from a public health perspective.

Ministers have been charged with the unenviable task of ensuring that hitting pause now does not lead to long-lasting damage. 

The chancellor has committed to doing “whatever it takes” to see the UK through the crisis. The Treasury's package includes £330 billion of zero-interest loans and loan guarantees for businesses, business rates relief and cash grants for retail, hospitality, and leisure companies, £10,000 cash grants to all small businesses, and a three month mortgage holiday for those in distress. More government action, we are told, will come with employment support.

But will this be enough to ensure the economy can recover? What, if anything, could the government be doing differently to reduce the damage? 

Joining the IEA’s Digital Manager Darren Grimes for the second of a two-part podcast series is Dr Steve Davies, Head of Education here at the Institute of Economic Affairs, to give his take on the government’s economic response to the Coronavirus crisis.

You can subscribe to the podcast on Podbean, Apple Music or Spotify.

As humans have spread across the world, so have infectious diseases. Even in this modern era, outbreaks are nearly constant, though not every outbreak reaches pandemic level as the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has.

Taking Control: The Dominic Cummings Story, a BBC two documentary revealed that Dominic Cummings can be described as many things to many people.

In a new series by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the IEA will explore free-market approaches to achieving the Government's target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In recent years climate change has been seen as the existential crisis of our time. But with the growing threat of coronavirus and a global health crisis on a scale many of us cannot comprehend, will the battle against climate change retain its urgency?

Here to discuss in this episode is Kingsmill Bond, the New Energy Strategist for Carbon Tracker, a financial think tank that carries out in-depth analysis on the impact of the energy transition. Kingsmill believes that this revolution is the most important driver of financial markets and geopolitics in the modern era.

The 2020s will see the introduction of one of the most profoundly transformative technologies for decades: the driverless car. In the world we have inhabited for the past 60 years, most adults own cars that they drive daily, which they then park in their garages, front yards or on the street, or in car parks when they go to the shops or the train station or the airport.

They arrange repairs, they put in fuel and water and oil, they pay car taxes and they buy insurance. Over the next decade, all of this might end, with profound implications for the way we live, but also for public policy across a wide range of areas. Fortunately to discuss but a few of these issues, the IEA's Digital Manager Darren Grimes was joined by Andrew Lilico, Executive Director and Principal of Europe Economics, who, in 2014, was part of a study on the topic.

In Dominic Frisby’s latest book, Daylight Robbery, we are invited to understand tax in a more fundamental and wide-reaching way. Frisby argues that we can understand many of the major events in world history through the prism of taxation. Wars, revolutions and even architectural design have typically, Frisby argues, been shaped – or even caused – by one form of tax or another.

Chlorinated chicken has become totemic once again in all things Brexit, since most British consumers associate chlorine with the bleach they pour down their lavatories. Are the arguments put forward by certain groups to keep US meat out of the UK market thinly veiled protectionism, or are they simply addressing justifiable concerns on food standards and safety?

Chile used to be considered the economic poster child of Latin America – economic liberalisation led to huge gains in terms of GDP, life expectancy and lifting people out of poverty. But in recent months, the country has been mired in violent protests, to which there is still no end in sight.

Who is to blame? For large parts of the Western media, the answer is simple: the culprit is neoliberalism! The Guardian titles: “Blame the Chicago Boys”, a reference to the foreign-trained economists who liberalised the Chilean economy during the Pinochet dictatorship. Open Democracy claims that “This economic system […] has benefitted the economic elites whilst creating inequality and suffering for the majority”. Inevitably, there have been some nostalgic references to Chile’s brief experiment with socialism in the early 1970s, the implication being that if only that experiment had continued, Chile would be a vastly better place today.

This presents us with a good opportunity for some stocktaking of the situation of a country that continues to fascinate a lot of observers on both the Left and the Right. So how should we evaluate the situation of Chile today: neoliberal hellhole or rags-to-riches success story? What explains the Left’s ongoing fondness for a brief socialist experiment that ended nearly half a century ago? What might Chile look like today if the socialists had succeeded? Can free-market liberals defend the legacy of the Chicago boys with a good conscience, given that those reforms were carried out under a brutal military dictatorship?”

In the year 2000, The Economist magazine described Africa as the “hopeless continent”, adding that the “new millennium has brought more disaster than hope to Africa.” But the 54 countries that make up the continent have some of the youngest and most vibrant populations in the world, accounting for over 17% of the world's population. 

The last twenty years have seen life expectancy and literacy rates shoot up and child mortality plummet, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. So what has driven these changes and can the momentum be maintained over the next twenty years? 

Joining the IEA's Emma Revell to discuss this is the IEA’s Alexander Hammond, Policy Adviser to the Director General at the IEA.

The government, in yet another attempt to look like they’re on top of the green agenda, has just brought forward its ban on all diesel, petrol and hybrid cars to 2035. From that date, you will only be allowed to buy electric or hydrogen vehicles. Our wise central-planners reckon those gas-guzzling, polluting SUVs we all like so much will be banished from the road, and all those petrol stations will be replaced with sleek charging stations.

But the state has a terrible record of telling us what to drive. It is only a few years since it used tax policy to get us all to buy diesels and no one needs to be reminded how that worked out. It was later discredited and severely damaged the market for second-hand diesels. The subsidies fuelled a rise in diesel cars, increasing air pollution. How we get around is changing at lightning speed – it would be better to allow consumers to shape that future instead of the state trying to dictate it. Or would it?