The UK escaped a liquidity trap in the 1930s and enjoyed a strong economic recovery. This column argues that what drove this recovery was ‘unconventional’ monetary policy implemented not by the Bank of England but by the Treasury. Thus, Neville Chamberlain was an early proponent of ‘Abenomics’. This raises the question: is inflation targeting by an independent central bank appropriate at a time of very low nominal-interest rates?

Elite universities’ admission policies are perennially surrounded by controversy given the thorny efficiency and equity issues involved. This column discusses research into such policies focusing on the degree of meritocracy and non-academic bias. It suggests that men and private-school applicants have somewhat higher application success rates despite being held to higher academic admission standards.

Can European countries share their debts? This column argues that higher government indebtedness means larger household net financial assets. Thus, any pooling of European legacy debt would be considered unacceptable by countries with less government debt unless it also involved the pooling of households’ financial assets. Yet, this would be legally and technically insurmountable. The EU must face forced Ricardian equivalence: the countries with the largest legacy-debt burdens must reduce them by increasing the tax burden or, alternatively, reduce their budget expenditure.

So far, discussions around Europe’s prospective banking union have focused only on the supervision of banks. This column argues that policymakers must also think about the resolution of banks in distress. While national governments confine themselves to the domestic effects of a banking failure, a European Resolution Authority could incorporate domestic and cross-border effects. A cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical resolution of the top 25 European banks shows that the UK, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands would be the main winners.

The latest GDP figures confirm that the UK economy has been more or less flat-lining since the financial crisis began. This column presents the LSE Growth Commission’s integrated recommendations for reigniting UK growth, arguing that an inability to achieve sustainable growth is rooted in longer-term problems arising from a failure to invest, notably in skills, infrastructure and innovation. The UK must engage evidence-based policy, in both word and deed, if it is to overcome international competition and myriad global changes.

The UK’s Independent Commission on Banking set out to make banking safer, to ensure that what just happened won’t happen again, and to change both the structure and regulation of banking as needed. But this column argues that the Commission fails to achieve any of these aims. It instead proposes a new way to make the financial system and wider economy safer.

As in every downturn, youth unemployment is a serious concern. This column looks at apprenticeship policy in England. It argues that England is a long way off the apprentice numbers of countries like Germany but with a clear strategy, some nudging, and flexibility, England could realistically aim for the prize that has so far eluded it – higher skills and high youth participation in the workforce.

Unemployment in the US and UK is over 8% and in many Eurozone countries is far higher. This column argues that we can’t just blame the recession – this is also symptomatic of long-term trends that, without a concerted effort by policymakers, will continue to stunt growth, deepen income inequality, weigh on public budgets, and cause living standards in many countries to stagnate.

The UK is about to make a massive change to its pension system. From October 2012, employers will be obliged to automatically enrol employees into a pension scheme – though individuals can opt-out. This column explores what this might mean for pension funding and argues that the risks are to the downside.

Worker productivity in the UK and a number of other countries has been persistently weak since the onset of the global crisis. This column argues that, in the UK at least, the weakness in service sector productivity is the biggest puzzle. In most other countries the weakness is more obvious in manufacturing.