Comparing the first half of this year with the first half of 1987, domestic demand rose very rapidly, probably by about 8 per cent. Consumer spending, after accelerating for some years, had reached a rate of growth of around 6 per cent. This was now reinforced by a sharp rise in expenditure on fixed investment, which may have been about 10 per cent over this period. This surge in demand was met by a good response from domestic supply, gross domestic product rising by about 5 per cent. But at the same time the boom conditions contributed to a significant deterioration in the balance of payments. A small surplus on current account in the first half of last year has been turned into a deficit at an annual rate of about £11 billion.

Between June and July the dollar rose by around 5 per cent against the other major currencies, despite central bank intervention to hold the dollar down. There have been two major factors behind this strength. Firstly, the US trade figures improved in April and May and were considerably better than the market had anticipated. This reflected both some reduction in the volume and value of imports and an increase in the level of exports. Sentiment towards the US dollar has also been affected by the strength of growth in the other major industrial economies.

In March this year, after a year in which policy appeared to be aimed at achieving stability against EMS currencies, the pound was allowed to rise sharply in response to large capital inflows. As with many fluctuations in exchange rates, this development was puzzling in that the prospects for the balance of payments suggested that the rise in sterling would not prove sustainable. On the other hand, high UK interest rates, particularly in relation to those available in EMS countries, provided some rationale for a temporary rise. This note uses a simple forward-looking equation for the exchange rate to illustrate the implications of alternative paths for interest rates and the balance of payments. A number of simulations are presented to illustrate the key elements of this approach.

It is often postulated that the reintroduction of credit controls would be neither effective nor politically possible. Major changes have been implemented over the last eight years both in the way that financial markets work (domestically and internationally) and in the conduct of monetary policy. Controls over either the size of the balance sheets of financial institutions or the terms under which customers can obtain loans would seem to run totally counter to these developments. Does this rule them out completely?

The most important government review of UK competition since Mrs Thatcher came into office has recently taken place. The review, which was announced in June 1986, was concerned with two aspects of policy—mergers and restrictive trade practices (RTP). Its conclusions were published in March 1988 in a Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) document, ‘Mergers policy’, and in a major Green Paper entitled ‘Review of restrictive trade practices policy’ (Cm 331, 1988). The proposals on RTP involve a fundamental change in policy. The new law will consider restrictive practices in terms of their economic effects upon competition and not, as at present, with the emphasis on their legal form. This reform will require new methods of operation and will be backed up by tougher powers and penalties than have hitherto been available in Britain.

This paper describes the overall properties of six major macroeconomic models, through dynamic multiplier analysis of a number of standard simulation exercises. The models are those of the London Business School (LBS), the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), HM Treasury (HMT), the Bank of England (BE), the City University Business School (CUBS) and the Liverpool University Research Group in Macroeconomics (LPL), as deposited with the ESRC Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau in late 1987. The simulations demonstrate the response of the models to changes in key policy instruments and to exogenous shocks; they are conducted, as far as possible, in a consistent manner across the models.

Rival theoretical explanations of events and phenomena are common in economics, of which the Keynesian versus the monetarist debate is perhaps the best known. The traditional empirical procedure in economics has been to formulate a model from each theoretical framework and test each model's restrictions against observed data, rejecting or corroborating the specific model accordingly as the evidence is adverse or favourable. Although such an approach seems objective and scientific, it has two serious drawbacks: in practice neither rejection nor corroboration are definitive.