Suez and Sterling, 1956

Daily data on spot and forward dollar/sterling exchange rates and on Britain's foreign exchange reserves are used to reassess the financial history of the 1956 Suez crisis. We find that support of sterling at its Bretton Woods lower bound lost credibility as early as July. Reserve losses also are consistent with an exchange rate crisis. We provide the first econometric study of foreign exchange market intervention in the pre-convertibility phase of the Bretton Woods system. The Bank of England's interventions reacted strongly both to official sterling and to the transferable sterling market in New York, which suggests that convertibility was a central goal of policy.Suez crisis, Bretton Woods system, foreign exchange market intervention

Suez and Sterling, 1956

Daily data on spot and forward dollar/sterling exchange rates and on Britain's foreign exchange reserves are used to reassess the financial history of the 1956 Suez crisis. We find that support of sterling at its Bretton Woods lower bound lost credibility as early as July. Reserve losses also are consistent with an exchange rate crisis. We provide the first econometric study of foreign exchange market intervention in the pre-convertibility phase of the Bretton Woods system. The Bank of England's interventions reacted strongly both to official sterling and to the transferable sterling market in New York, which suggests that convertibility was a central goal of policy

How could everyone have been so wrong? Forecasting the Great Depression with the railroads

Contemporary observers viewed the recession that began in the summer of 1929 as nothing extraordinary. Recent analyses have shown that the subsequent large deflation was econometrically forecastable, implying that a driving force in the depression was the high expected real interest rates faced by business. Using a neglected data set of forecasts by railroad shippers, we find that business was surprised by the magnitude of the great depression. We show that an ARIMA or Holt- Winters model of railroad shipments would have produced much smaller forecast errors than those indicated by the surveys. The depth and duration of the depression was beyond the experience of business, which appears to have believed that recovery would happen quickly as in previous recessions. This failure to anticipate the collapse of the economy suggests roles for both high real rates of interest and a debt deflation in the propagation of the depression

There is no market for new antibiotics: this allows an open approach to research and development

There is an increasingly urgent need for new antibiotics, yet there is a significant and persistent economic problem when it comes to developing such medicines. The problem stems from the perceived need for a “market” to drive commercial antibiotic development. In this article, we explore abandoning the market as a prerequisite for successful antibiotic research and development. Once one stops trying to fix a market model that has stopped functioning, one is free to carry out research and development (R&D) in ways that are more openly collaborative, a mechanism that has been demonstrably effective for the R&D underpinning the response to the COVID pandemic. New “open source” research models have great potential for the development of medicines for areas of public health where the traditional profit-driven model struggles to deliver. New financial initiatives, including major push/pull incentives, aimed at fixing the broken antibiotics market provide one possible means for funding an openly collaborative approach to drug development. We argue that now is therefore the time to evaluate, at scale, whether such methods can deliver new medicines through to patients, in a timely manner

Global patient outcomes after elective surgery: prospective cohort study in 27 low-, middle- and high-income countries.

BACKGROUND: As global initiatives increase patient access to surgical treatments, there remains a need to understand the adverse effects of surgery and define appropriate levels of perioperative care. METHODS: We designed a prospective international 7-day cohort study of outcomes following elective adult inpatient surgery in 27 countries. The primary outcome was in-hospital complications. Secondary outcomes were death following a complication (failure to rescue) and death in hospital. Process measures were admission to critical care immediately after surgery or to treat a complication and duration of hospital stay. A single definition of critical care was used for all countries. RESULTS: A total of 474 hospitals in 19 high-, 7 middle- and 1 low-income country were included in the primary analysis. Data included 44 814 patients with a median hospital stay of 4 (range 2-7) days. A total of 7508 patients (16.8%) developed one or more postoperative complication and 207 died (0.5%). The overall mortality among patients who developed complications was 2.8%. Mortality following complications ranged from 2.4% for pulmonary embolism to 43.9% for cardiac arrest. A total of 4360 (9.7%) patients were admitted to a critical care unit as routine immediately after surgery, of whom 2198 (50.4%) developed a complication, with 105 (2.4%) deaths. A total of 1233 patients (16.4%) were admitted to a critical care unit to treat complications, with 119 (9.7%) deaths. Despite lower baseline risk, outcomes were similar in low- and middle-income compared with high-income countries. CONCLUSIONS: Poor patient outcomes are common after inpatient surgery. Global initiatives to increase access to surgical treatments should also address the need for safe perioperative care. STUDY REGISTRATION: ISRCTN5181700

Why Chamberlain failed and Bismarck succeeded: The political economy of tariffs in British and German elections

This article analyses three crucial elections which determined the fate of free trade in Britain and Germany. These are the elections of 1906 in the UK and 1877 and 1878 in Germany. We examine the political economy of trade policy by examining the voting patterns of the electorates in their choice of commercial policy. The underlying hypothesis to be explored is that voting behaviour was based on the economic interests of the constituents as determined by the international trade performance of the sector in which they were employed. An econometric model reveals the degree to which the support for and opposition to free trade was based on occupational characteristics and well explains the outcome for Germany in 1877. The analysis for Britain extends previous work by Irwin (1994) by assessing how considerations of turnout, religion and restricted voting rights alter the results of his original model. In 1878 in Germany religious affiliation and turnout played a significant role in the result although not in the ways assumed by historians, in particular the outcome of the election was not determined by the mobilisation of agricultural labourers on the great estates. The results of estimating the model shows that franchise restrictions contributed to the victory of free trade in Britain, but their absence had no impact on the result in Germany.