In Tandem: The case for coordinated economic policymaking

The daunting array of economic problems facing Britain – low growth, inadequate investment, stagnant productivity, accelerating climate change and suppressed wages – are closely connected. Yet since 1997, the institutions most responsible for addressing them, the Treasury and the Bank of England, have been kept quite separate, operating in distinct, deliberately constructed siloes.

In this pamphlet, Michael Jacobs, Robert Calvert Jump, Jo Michell and Frank van Lerven scrutinise the so-called ‘consensus assignment’, which specifies a hard division of labour between the government and the central bank. With informal coordination happening anyway, especially during the pandemic years, the authors argue that new, more transparent arrangements are needed. Analysing the wider array of institutions now involved in economic policymaking, they propose a new Economic Policy Coordinating Committee to help achieve the multiple objectives towards which governments today must aim.