Certainly we need to reform the system to try to ensure greater stability - and a great deal of effort has been expended on precisely that over the past few years - by developing standards and codes of best practice by national authorities, for example, designed to help them to help themselves to take greater advantage of the opportunities presented by globalisation. More certainly needs to be - and is being - done, recognising the particular problems facing different countries at different stages of development. But it would be a terrible mistake to turn the clock back and retreat from “globalisation” into a world of nation states linked together predominantly by official financing. None of the poorer countries themselves are arguing for that, yet that is what some of the protests seem to imply. And so it is with some of the more specific issues - like pushing for higher labour standards in developing countries, which is fine up to a point, but if pushed too far could mean lower activity and higher unemployment in those countries; or debt forgiveness not tied to programs designed to improve the lot of the people living in the debtor countries; or the appropriateness of particular development projects and so on - we cannot simply focus on particular aspects of the problem in isolation, we need to examine both the pros and the cons in each case to try to find the best means to what is quite likely to be an agreed end.
But it certainly has helped us to achieve a significantly better macro-economic performance over the past few years, and that in itself has helped in addressing at least some of our social problems. Over the eight years or so since the last recession in the early 1990s retail price inflation - on the Government’s target measure - has averaged some 2¾%. That’s a lower rate for longer than anyone can remember. This much greater degree of price stability is a “good thing” in itself - economically because it contributes to more rational, longer-term, decision making, but also socially, because it is typically the poorer, less financially sophisticated, sectors of society - for example those living on low fixed incomes - that suffer most from inflation. But low inflation is not simply an end in itself. The real benefit is that alongside sustained stability we have experienced the longest period of quarter-by-quarter growth since quarterly records began. Over the whole period annual output growth has averaged a little over 2¾% which is significantly higher than the earlier trend rate of around 2¼%. But more even than that, employment has increased steadily by nearly 2½m people over the same period, so that the number in work is today the highest on record. And unemployment has progressively fallen almost month by month on a claimant count basis (though with a slight setback last month) and the rate of unemployment is just about the lowest rate we’ve seen for about 25 years in the UK as a whole.