“It is very hard to know if someone in the public sector is doing anything useful”
There is agreement among the “Remainer” contingent of economists that the poor outlook for the UK economy in both relative and absolute terms is attributable to Brexit. Roger Bootle, chairman of Capital Economics, takes issue with that argument, noting that economic growth in the UK since the second quarter of 2016, at 6.8%, is barely half that of the US (12.9%) and lags France (7.6%), but is ahead of Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan.
He admits that the UK’s performance relative to other G7 constituents is not quite as good in per-capita terms, but reminds us that “most economists who supported Brexit believed that in the
