Overview

The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance is about the politics of economic ideas and technocratic economic governance. It is also a book about the changing political economy of British capitalism's relationship to the European and wider global economies. It focuses on the creation in 2010 and subsequent operation of the independent body created to oversee fiscal rectitude in Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). More broadly, it analyses the politics of economic management of the UK's uncertain trajectory, and of British capitalism's restructuring in the 2010s and 2020s in the face of the upheavals of the global financial crisis (GFC), Brexit and COVID. A focus on the intersection between expert economic opinion of the OBR as UK's fiscal watchdog, and the political economy of British capitalism's evolution through and after Brexit, animates a framework for analysing the politics of technocratic economic governance. The technocratic vision of independent fiscal councils fails to grasp a core political economy insight: that economic knowledge and narratives are political and social constructs. The book unpacks the competing constructions of economic reason that underpin models of British capitalism, and through that inform expert economic assessment of the UK economy. It also underlines how contestable political economic assumptions undergird visions of Britain's international economic relations. These were all brought to the fore in economic policy debates about Britain's place in the world, which in the 2010s centred on Brexit. This book analyses OBR forecasting and fiscal oversight in that broader political context, rather than as a narrowly technical pursuit.

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9780192871121

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A truly memorable and fantastically well researched contribution to a crucial literature that offers us profound insights into the politicisation, depoliticisation, repoliticisation and attempted re-depoliticisation of economic policy in the UK since the 1990s. Required reading for all students of contemporary British political economy and highly recommended. * Professor Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris * Why have economic policymakers been so enamoured with rules and targets since the late twentieth century and yet keep finding ways of getting around them? What are the political implications of the UK government's decades-long love affair with technocratic economic governance? Through his careful analysis of the history of the Office of Budget Responsibility, Clift's book brilliantly answers these and other important questions. He shows us how seemingly neutral technocratic economic forecasts are in fact dependent on a great number of contestable theories, and then demonstrates the profoundly political nature of their different assumptions. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and engaged citizens who want to understand the pathologies and possibilities inherent in policymakers' efforts to forecast an increasingly uncertain economic future. * Professor Jacqueline Best, University of Ottawa * This is an outstanding book, a major work of scholarship on a neglected subject. Through its detailed study of the OBR it makes an important argument about the nature and limits of technocratic governance. The attempt by the Truss Government to sideline the OBR (with disastrous results) makes the analysis more relevant than ever. * Professor Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield *

Author Information

Ben Clift is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His research and teaching interests integrate comparative and international political economy. He received his PhD from the Sheffield University in 2000. Before joining Warwick, he held lectureships at Sheffield and Brunel Universities. He has been research fellow at Sciences-Po, Paris and the University of Oxford. In 2018 he won a prestigious Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. He has published widely on comparative capitalisms, the IMF, the politics of economic ideas, and the political economy of economic patriotism in many leading journals.

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