Political Economy of Growth and Institutional Reform

人们普遍认为，英国在一些对中长期经济繁荣至关重要的领域存在持续的弱点。其中最明显的例子是人力资本形成和基础设施投资方面。中等教育结束时成绩不佳的长尾现象一直是英国学校体系的一个显著特征。在英国，五分之一享受免费校餐的孩子在7岁时没有达到预期的数学水平，到11岁时，这一比例上升到三分之一。这使得英国与其他几个发达经济体不同，并对经济增长和不平等造成了破坏性影响。几十年来，职业教育和学徒制一直是政治关注和政策改革的对象。尽管做出了这些努力，但英国技能体系的一个长期特征是，与一些主要竞争对手相比，它在中级培训方面相对薄弱。基础设施投资，尤其是交通和能源投资，是另一个长期存在弱点的领域。严重的交通拥堵使部分交通系统不堪重负。不断恶化的能源发电能力令人担心，在中期内，供应安全可能无法得到保障。自20世纪90年代以来，英国某些地区的房屋建设和开发已成为一个重大问题，具有增长和再分配的含义。有证据表明，它导致了房价的上涨和住房质量的下降，住房市场波动性的增加，以及财富从年轻人和穷人向老年人和富人的大量转移。在所有这些领域，现有的研究集中于查明和衡量政策效率低下的影响，并提出备选的政策安排。在其他国家，研究已经开始从研究不同政策选择的相对优点转向研究引入不同政策的障碍。然而，在英国，这种类型的研究仍然很少，关于低效率起源的基本问题仍然没有答案。对于这些领域长期政策扭曲的根源——激励机制的结构，几乎没有详细的分析。也就是说，对这些扭曲的政治经济根源的系统处理在很大程度上仍然缺失。对制度改革驱动因素的研究也是如此，这些研究关注的是改善福利的制度变革在哪些条件下变得可行。本项目旨在填补这些空白，以现有文献为基础，为政策制定者和民间社会提供一套更广泛的分析工具，用于围绕与增长有关的政策领域的制度改革进行辩论。该项目旨在通过详细说明阻碍增长的结构性弱点的政治经济根源，实现这一目标。这将涉及跨学科的研究工作，将政治经济学和政治学联系起来，将分析牢牢地嵌入英国宏观政治体系的特质中。这项工作将阐明解决这些弱点和促进长期增长所需的体制改革。最后一步是调查在充满政治色彩的环境中推动制度变革的各种力量，比如围绕技能形成和基础设施投资的力量。该分析将利用现有证据，证明技能和基础设施方面根深蒂固的政策功能失调；政治经济模式，同时寻求探索它们与威斯敏斯特议会模式的相互作用；国际实证研究的结果，着眼于启动改革所需的条件、改革的有效发展和实施；以及对英国近期政策创新的新研究，包括货币、财政和竞争政策治理的变化。

It is widely accepted that the UK suffers from persistent weaknesses in areas that are crucial for medium to long-run economic prosperity. Amongst the starkest examples are aspects of human capital formation and investment in infrastructure.A long tail of poor achievement at the end of secondary education has been a defining feature of the UK school systems. A fifth of children in England on free school meals do not reach the expected maths level at age 7 and this proportion rises to a third by age 11.This sets the UK apart from several other advanced economies, and creates damaging effects for both growth and inequality.Vocational education and apprenticeships have been the object of continuing political attention and policy reform for decades. Despite these efforts, a longstanding feature of the UK skills system is its relative weakness in intermediate level training in comparison with some of its main competitors.Investment in infrastructure, especially transport and energy, is another area where enduring weaknesses have been identified. High levels of congestion are placing parts of the transport system under strain. Deteriorating energy generating capacity is raising fears that security of supply may not be ensured in the medium term.Since the 1990s, house building and development in certain areas of the UK has become a significant problem, with growth and redistributive implications. Evidence suggests it has led to increases in house prices and reductions in housing quality, increases in housing market volatility, and large transfers of wealth from the young and the poor to the old and the wealthy. In all of these areas, existing studies have concentrated on identifying and measuring the effects of policy inefficiencies, and proposing alternative policy arrangements. In other countries, research has started to shift from studying the relative merits of different policy alternatives, to studying the obstacles to the introduction of different sets of policies. In the UK, however, this type of research is still rare, and fundamental questions regarding the origins of inefficiencies remain unanswered. There has been little detailed analysis of the structures of incentives that lie at the foundations of long-lasting policy distortions in those areas. I.e. a systematic treatment of the political economy roots of these distortions is still largely missing. The same can be said of studies of the drivers of institutional reform, focused on the conditions under which welfare-improving institutional change becomes feasible. This project aims to fill these gaps, building on existing literature and giving policy makers and civil society a wider set of analytical tools with which to frame debates around institutional reform of growth-relevant policy areas. The project aims to achieve this by producing a detailed account of the political economy root-causes of structural weaknesses that hamper growth. This will involve an interdisciplinary research effort, bridging political economy and political science, to embed the analysis firmly in the idiosyncrasies of the UK macro-political system. This exercise will shed light on the institutional changes required to address those weaknesses and promote long-term growth. The final step is to investigate the constellation of forces that drive institutional change in politically-charged environments, such as those that surround skills formation and infrastructure investment.The analysis will draw on available evidence on entrenched policy dysfunctions in skills and infrastructure; political economy models, while seeking to explore their interactions with the Westminster parliamentary model; results from international empirical research looking at the conditions required to initiate reforms, their effective development and implementation; and new research on recent policy innovation in the UK, including changes in the governance of monetary, fiscal and competition policy.