Over the past twenty years the expansion of the British economy has been supported by growth in the financial services industry. With the onset of the financial crisis it seems most unlikely that the financial services industry can, in the future, act as the sort of motor of growth that it had done in the past. This commentary provides an overview of the role of the financial services sector in the economy over the past twenty years and assesses likely developments in the future. It first assesses the contribution of the sector to the economy and then considers the issues surrounding its likely shape in the future.

In October 2008, we were already projecting that 2009 would see the worst recession in the OECD economies since 1982, and if the resolution of problems in the banking sector were to be delayed then the outcome would be much worse. We are now facing the deepest global recession in post-war history, with global growth of just ½ per cent expected this year. Output in the OECD group of economies is projected to decline by 1.8 per cent this year, with annual declines in output anticipated in all the G7 economies, even after all fiscal stimulus packages are taken into account. We estimate that about 0.8 per cent of global GDP, or roughly $550 billion, will be lost this year due to the delay in restoring capital adequacy in the banking sector in the major economies over the past three months.

According to the formal dating of the business cycle by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the US economy reached a peak of economic activity in December 2007, which marks the beginning of the US recession. While some economists tend to refer to a technical recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP, the NBER uses a broader definition of ‘a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy and lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators'. The committee pays particular attention to payroll employment, which has declined by 1.9 per cent since the peak reached in December 2007, allowing the unemployment rate to reach 7.2 per cent in December 2008, the highest rate since 1992. We expect a sharper decline in US employment this year, and see the unemployment rate reaching 10½ per cent in 2010, the highest level since a brief peak in 1982.

Recent economic developments in Asia have proved significantly worse than anticipated. Year-on-year GDP growth in China slowed to 6.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2008, the slowest rate of growth since 1991 and well below the government's target rate of growth of 8 per cent that is required to maintain a stable employment rate. It is difficult to establish the source of the Chinese slowdown with the available data. Fixed capital investment continued to expand rapidly, and the trade surplus in value terms rose to record high levels in the final quarter of the year. This suggests that consumption was weak, although retail sales figures indicate strong growth in the final quarter of the year. We have assumed that the slowdown observed in the fourth quarter was driven primarily by domestic demand. The collapse in global trade this year will have a significant impact on Chinese exports, given that nearly 50 per cent of Chinese goods exports are in the machinery and transport equipment sector. We expect GDP growth to average about 5½ per cent this year, with growth reverting above 8 per cent per annum only in 2012.

The Euro Area will experience a deep and relatively protracted recession. In the third quarter of 2008 Euro Area GDP fell by 0.2 per cent on a quarterly basis and we estimate that in the fourth quarter it dropped by a further 1 per cent. In 2009, the European Monetary Union is expected to suffer the sharpest downturn it has ever experienced, and it is expected to be sharper than the downturns experienced by member countries in the early 1990s and 1980s as well as the mid 1970s — see figure 17. The economy is expected to contract by 2 per cent year-on-year. In 2010 the Euro Area economy is expected to show no growth at all in annual terms, before it slowly returns to its potential growth path in the medium term. In the longer term there may be scarring from the crisis on the level of output, but we suggest that it will be noticeably less than in the UK and the US as they economies have been more dependent on financial services.

The current financial crisis has evolved slowly over the past eighteen months, and policy reactions have responded to events. In August 2007 it became clear that a number of banks had lost some of their capital base as a result of defaults on home loans in the US. The impacts of these defaults had been spread across the Atlantic as they were contained within bundles of assets that had been constructed into securities and sold to European banks. By the autumn of 2007 it was clear that there was a strong risk of a banking crisis, as discussed by Barrell and Holland (2007) in the October 2007 Review. We considered that this was a risk, but that the costs were so obviously large that policymakers would strive to avoid it, and hence it was not our main scenario. We were wrong on both counts, and a crisis at least as large as that we discussed emerged after the US authorities let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008. We argued that a crisis would lead to a reduction in growth of a cumulated 3 per cent in the US and a cumulated loss of about 2 ½ per cent in the UK and the Euro Area. If a crisis burst, we expected US interest rates to reach zero in 2009 with deflation toward the end of the year.

We investigate the effects of changes in taxes using the National Institute international macro model, NiGEM. A comparison on fiscal impulses worth 1 per cent of GDP for one year is made, with a comparison of a direct tax change, indirect tax change, and a lump sum payment. Multipliers are assessed one country at a time and when policy is coordinated to increase its impacts. We look at the importance of releasing borrowing constraints in a banking crisis. The analysis assumes financial and foreign exchange markets are forward looking.

Since our October forecast events have conspired to worsen the outlook for the UK and global economy. Concerns about the solvency of banks across the globe have continued, and in some cases intensified. The inter-linkages of the global economy continue to be highlighted as the list of economies slipping into recession grows, even for those who have not suffered the direct shock of a crisis in their domestic banking system. Indeed what started as a problem in securities markets related to sub-prime lending in the US mortgage market has evolved into the near collapse of the global banking system. The UK has enjoyed the fruits of the rapid growth of financial intermediation over the past decade. However, such gains are being sharply reversed, as discussed on pp. 4–8 of this Review. The problem of access to credit for households and non-financial corporations still persists and, if anything, the situation seems to have deteriorated. As discussed on pp. 71–2 of this Review, Bank of England data suggest that lending by banks to households and businesses contracted in the final quarter of last year, even though £37 billion (2.6 per cent of money GDP) of new capital was injected into two major UK banking groups, effectively nationalising one of them (Royal Bank of Scotland).

One might expect bank borrowing to rise during a recession as businesses seek extra credit to tide them over; the data have to be seen in this context. Indeed, in the 1990s recession lending by banks adjusted for inflation continued to rise (with one interruption) until almost the end of the recession. However, recently lending to UK businesses has been declining, as figure 1 shows. This indicates lending by UK and foreign banks to non-bank businesses with data available up to the end of the third quarter of 2008 after deflating with the GDP deflator.

In 1998 childcare was for the first time put on the political map with the publication of the Green Paper ‘Meeting the Childcare Challenge’ (DfEE, 1998), setting out the first National Childcare Strategy. Since then the childcare landscape has changed beyond recognition with a range of initiatives and considerable funding aimed at improving childcare services. A decade after its introduction, this article considers what the childcare strategy has achieved in relation to early years and what remains to be done to meet its key aim, that is: to provide good quality childcare for all parents who need it and all children who can benefit from it.

This paper briefly reviews international perspectives on quality in mixed economies of childcare in a number of countries; in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the Netherlands and South Africa. In all these countries the private market is dominant; that is, the Government takes the view that childcare is best provided by private for-profit or non-profit entrepreneurs, even if part-subsidised by the state through tax credits or some other form of subsidy. This contrasts with countries like France where for-profit care is simply not permitted, and the state provides universal services through the école maternelle system.

Early years education has been attributed as having benefits for the public good, avoiding social stratification and acquiring human capital. Although these outcomes appear social, the focus on value for money highlights their economic undertones. However, an assessment of value for money in early years education has a number of tensions, not only in relation to how and for whom value is assessed, but also with regard to the marginalisation of the economic position of early years education providers and emerging evidence of both hidden and masked costs within the sector. Drawing on interviews with a range of stakeholders, it will be demonstrated, therefore, that there is a need to acknowledge wider contextual issues when making an assessment of value for money in early years education.

In the past decade early years education has expanded throughout England with progressive extensions in entitlement to some hours of free provision. Furthermore, there is consistent evidence that shows that early years education leads to improvement in cognitive and social development for children. This paper uses the latest data from the Millennium Cohort Study to consider whether, in an era of near universal provision, receipt of early years education still leads to better outcomes for children than for those who did not receive early years education and whether different characteristics of provision produce better outcomes. The outcome measures we consider are the Foundation Stage Profile Assessments that apply to all children in England.