Why we should be concerned about further planned austerity

In the latest Fraser Economic Commentary we discuss the threat to the Scottish and UK economies of the UK Coalition's current plans to increase the pace and scale of austerity  over the next 4 years.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies in their IFS Green Budget 2015 highlight the scale of the UK government’s recent and planned fiscal consolidation programme. The IFS analysis shows that by 2014 £110bn of fiscal tightening measures had been implemented. A further £92bn of fiscal tightening is currently planned. So, on this measure 55% of planned fiscal consolidation has been completed with 45% still to come.

Of the further planned fiscal tightening, a comparison of IMF forecasts for structural borrowing in 32 advanced economies shows that the UK has the largest planned fiscal consolidation between 2015 and 2019 and the 18th largest (or 15th smallest) planned structural deficit in 2019. Some £200 billion of fiscal tightening is nearly 13% of GDP.

If we assume a multiplier of 1.5 – not unreasonable when interest rates are close to zero and there is no scope for countervailing monetary policy - the policy would have served to have reduced GDP by 10% up to 2014 and by a further 9% by 2019.

This doesn’t mean that GDP will fall by 9% between now and 2019 but does imply that private sector output must rise by a substantial amount if GDP growth is to remain in positive territory. Specifically, if the economy is to grow at around 2.5% per annum then the underlying growth rate of the private sector in the face of such anticipated fiscal consolidation would need to be of the order of 4% per annum: a big challenge for the private sector.

The outcome will also be dependent on the result of the General Election in May 2015 because the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are planning a slower pace of fiscal consolidation and a Conservative or indeed an unspecified Coalition government might alter the scale and pace of current plans or bias any consolidation more towards tax rises than via spending cuts, which could have a different impact on growth.