The new Chancellor, John Major, has taken office at a difficult time for the conduct of economic policy. The boom of the late 1980s has spent its force, but as yet there is no sign of the improvement in the balance of payments, or the reduction in inflation one might expect as a consequence.

In our main forecasts we show output growth in 1990 of just over 1½ per cent, less than 1 per cent excluding North Sea oil production. Consumer spending, which gave the main impetus to the early stages of the boom, will hardly rise next year and stock building is expected to turn negative. Fixed investment is unlikely to contribute much to the growth of demand year-on-year. The fall in the exchange rate during this year will help to sustain export growth next year, although world markets will not be as buoyant as they have been in 1989.

The resignation of Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the appointment of John Major to replace him, has been accompanied by vigorous denials of any change in the aims or conduct of economic policy. There may nevertheless be some modification of the stated reliance on interest rates alone as the means of combating inflation. The previous Chancellor was heavily committed to a programme of cuts in income tax; the new Chancellor may feel less so. For that reason we are now assuming that no net change in taxation will be announced in the 1990 Budget.

The overall outlook: longer-term prospects The second half of the 1980s has seen relatively strong, and rising growth in most of the major seven economies. This performance has been accompanied by a slow increase in the average rate of inflation. This combination was aided by the fall in world oil prices in 1986 and weak commodity prices. Only toward the end of the decade did strong growth begin to put pressure on commodity prices, and then only temporarily because of stock shortages of metals and minerals. The world economy was also operating with some degree of spare capacity in 1986 and 1987, allowing a period of sustained non-inflationary growth.

The Institute's Global Econometric Model (GEM) contains over 300 estimated relationships and the processes of data revision and of structural change in the world economy necessitate continual revision to the model. (Many new equations are reported in the World Economy chapter of the Institute Review, but many others are also introduced without comment.) The model used for the current forecast contains 41 new equations, and these have changed the properties of the model in significant ways.

The forecast published in this Review uses the latest vintage of the Institute's domestic econometric model, version 11.4. In comparison with the model described a year ago (Model 11.1, see Wren-Lewis, (1988)) some of the main developments are:

1) The key price and wage equations are both forward looking, and are based on explicit dynamic theories of adjustment. This is perhaps the first time that a large quarterly econometric model has attempted to identify the structural characteristics of nominal inertia in the UK.

Following previous comparisons by the National Institute of matched samples of manufacturing plants in Britain and Germany, this study applies similar methods to a branch of the services sector namely, the hotel industry. The objectives were to obtain measures of average productivity-differences between the countries in hotel-work, and to examine to what extent differences in equipment and training are important contributory factors. The paper discusses implications for schooling and training policies.

In view of the abundant resources of coal in the United Kingdom, it was natural that at the time immediately following the first oil shock in 1973 certain hopes were pinned on coal: that coal usage would recover enabling the country to reduce its high reliance on oil. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear by now that whilst the importance of oil in our energy supplies has indeed been reduced, it was not primarily due to any resurgence of the demand for coal. The production and consumption of coal have continued to decline.

The number of one parent families has risen by about 80 per cent since 1971, reaching just over a million in 1986. (Haskey 1989). In 1986, they made up 14 per cent of all families with dependent children, and the primary reason for this large increase is marital breakup: about 70 per cent of the increase is attributable to the growth in the number of divorced and separated mothers. At present, 90 per cent of single parents are women, and ¾ of mothers heading one parent families have previously been married.