Author Archives: Mark Dembowicz

March 2015 Economic and fiscal outlook

The Government’s policy decisions in Budget 2015 have led us to revise down our deficit forecasts, to expect the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall a year earlier and to revise up public spending as a share of GDP in five years’ time. Our forecast implies the Government is on track to meet its new fiscal mandate…

Exchange of letters between Ed Balls and Robert Chote

Robert Chote and Ed Balls have exchanged letters on the latter’s proposal that the OBR should provide independent scrutiny and certification of political parties’ proposed manifesto commitments on spending and tax.

Forecast evaluation report 2013

The economy has recovered much more slowly over the past three years than the OBR expected, but the impact on the public finances has been relatively modest in large part because our over-optimism has been concentrated in those areas of nominal income and spending that are relatively lightly taxed: investment rather than consumer spending and…

Budget 2013 Economic and fiscal outlook

Our Budget forecast was published on 20 March alongside the Budget. It contains forecasts for the UK economy and public finances to 2017-18 and our assessment of whether the Government is likely to achieve its fiscal mandate and supplementary target. The full document and supporting information is available on the main EFO page.

Press notice: Asset Purchase Facility

The Chancellor announced today that the excess cash held at the Bank of England’s Quantitative Easing facility will be transferred to the Exchequer. This notice sets out our initial take on what this means for the public finances. We will make a more detailed assessment on the impact on the public finances when we publish…

Working paper No.3: Cyclically adjusting the public finances

This working paper reassesses the size of the cyclical adjustment coefficients considering a range of approaches. Using these coefficients and the OBR’s historical output gap series we produce an updated historical series for structural net borrowing. We have also published a database of all the major tax policy measures announced in Budgets since 1970.

Briefing paper No.4: How we present uncertainty

In our latest Briefing paper we set out our approach to presenting uncertainty both about the outlook for the economy and about the performance of revenues and spending in any given state of the economy.

Policy Costings document November 2011

November 2011 The Office for Budget Responsibility certified all of the costings of policy decisions announced at the Autumn Statement (and measures announced post-Budget 2011 but confirmed at the Autumn Statement).  For information about these costings see the Autumn Statement 2011 policy costings document.  Annex A of this document contains further detail about the OBR scrutiny…