Vacant buildings and sites used not to be subject rates, the UK national tax on business property. The Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 removed this exemption. We were sceptical about the legislation at the time and events have proved us right. Property owners have been trying to challenge the legislation and have now got their way. The owner of a building in Sunderland took the Valuation Office...

The importance of geography – review of a book by Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography. The separation of economics and geography as academic discplines is one of the reasons why economic problems seem so intractable. Geography goes a long way to explaining phenomena such as regional economic imbalance and the Brexit vote. This book sounds as if it is worth looking at.

I have just been engaged in a correspondence in the FT. I argued that Brexit needs to begin by getting ourselves outside a tariff wall. I was challenged with this comment “The EU’s tariff wall is what is protecting us. Countries like the US can decimate the British wheat farmers. Japan can decimate the UK car industries (by switching the production back to Japan from the UK) and the...

I came across this today in a newspaper discussion group. “You misunderstand (bet that’s not the first time someone has said that to you!) the tariffs you refer to protect the jobs of EU workers” I responded as follows. “Yes I am well aware that is the aim but it has the opposite effect in the long run. It is one reason why unemployment is so high across the EU. It has not...

 “Macroeconomics is in a state of great confusion. The profession is deeply divided. Far from there being a body of knowledge which is generally accepted, almost every position is extremely contentious. Public discussion of economics has no coherent rationale, and governments, notwithstanding their emphatic rhetoric, cannot give a credible explanation of how it is that their policies fail...

Piketty still hasn’t a clue. His comments in today’s Observer, calling for international action, demonstrate the point. The Observer itself is worse, with a call for United Nations action in a piece headed, “The Observer view on how to clean up a squalid world financial mess“. Both pieces appear in the Observer/Guardian’s section laughably called “Comment is free”,...

One point of view that has surfaced widely since the boom-bust of 2008-2010 is the assertion that economics is is not a science. In the light of the failure of mainstream economists to predict the course of events, it is understandable that a lot of people should come to this conclusion. The view was summed up by a commentator thus: It is not a science because of the steps of the “Scientific...

The accusation that Royal Mail was flogged-off cheap rumbles on. There was certainly something fishy about the floatation – this was no “Tell Sid” operation with the aim of getting the wider public interested in buying the shares. The old Royal Mail was, amongst other things, a large property portfolio.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is now coming to wider public attention following its publication last year. According to Wikipedia, “The central thesis of the book is that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism and that these excesses of capitalism can only be reversed through state intervention. The book...

Article in FT by Samuel Brittan. A potted history that reflects no credit on the politicians involved, nor on the officials who advise them, nor on the academic world that propagates the theories on which their policies are founded and justified.