Gavin Cameron (Research Fellow) continued to work on the ESRC project Modelling Non-stationarity in Economic Time-Series wit

Gavin Cameron (Research Fellow) continued to work on the ESRC project ‘Modelling Non-stationarity in Economic Time-Series’ with John Muellbauer, David Hendry, and Jurgen Doornik. His research focussed on two main areas. First, on the relationship between economic growth and international trade. Three papers (written with James Proudman and Stephen Redding) were published in a Bank of England book on the effect of openness and growth on UK manufacturing. He also started work with Cecilia García-Peñalosa and Bertrand Koebel (Magdeburg) on the effects of international trade in intermediate goods, the idea being that imported intermediates might be substitutes for unskilled workers and complements for skilled workers, so that increased intermediate trade might drive down the relative wages of the unskilled.

Second, he continued to work with John Muellbauer on a variety of UK labour and housing market issues. In a paper on regional wages and unemployment, they found that the housing market had a strong effect on regional wages and that unemployment had a bigger negative effect on the wages of manual men than of non-manual men. Another paper revealed some problems in the construction of the UK regional accounts measures of earnings, which have important implications for studies of regional consumption and of regional convergence. It turns out that the regional accounts understate the relative rise in the fortunes of the South East in the 1980s, and therefore understate the amount of regional divergence in that period.

During the year he presented his work at the University of Washington in Seattle; the European Economic Association in Santiago de Compostela; and in Glasgow and Oxford.

Publications

(with J Proudman and S Redding) ‘Openness and its Association with Productivity Growth in UK Manufacturing’, chapter 4 in J Proudman and S Redding (eds.), Openness and Growth. London: Bank of England, 1998.

(with J Proudman and S Redding) ‘Productivity Convergence and International Openness’, chapter 5 in J Proudman and S Redding (eds.), Openness and Growth. London: Bank of England, 1998.

(with J Proudman and S Redding) ‘Deconstructing Growth in UK Manufacturing’, chapter 6 in J Proudman and S Redding (eds.), Openness and Growth. London: Bank of England, 1998.

(with John Muellbauer) ‘Housing Doesn’t Work’, Parliamentary Brief, 5, 1998.