The government's tough talk on immigration makes a mockery of its "open for business" motto, a leading economist has said. Migration control was a ...

George Osborne has been dealt a double blow by the International Monetary Fund, after it told the chancellor he should consider changing his austerity...

All in all, the problems are mounting. The economic plan has not delivered what was promised, people are feeling the pain, but without the promised benefits being delivered.

The first substantive line of George Osborne's budget speech was: "We've now cut the deficit not by a quarter, but by a third". This might be surprising to anybody who read my earlier blog here, which pointed out that the deficit had (measured on a rolling twelve- month basis) been rising, not falling, for the last year or so.

I will leave the intricate takedowns of the coalition's housing, corporation tax and fuel duty escalator plans for the broadsheet newspapers - they do it better than most everyone else. I wish to focus on the macro side of things and, in particular, the role of the Bank of England in this year's and further budgets.

George Osborne's budget yesterday rightly focussed on some of the issues vital to improving the economic performance of our cities, including increased access to housing, new infrastructure investment, and empowering our urban areas to take greater direct control of their economies themselves. But many of the policies announced will be implemented from 2015, meaning that this is a budget which more about growth tomorrow than growth today

George Osborne continues to make the same error he made in previous budgets. He is assuming the British economy will return to robust growth from 2014 onwards and that this will deliver the higher tax revenues needed to achieve his deficit reduction plan.

Growth has ground to a halt, real wages are falling and more than 6m people want work but can't find it: yet our chancellor continues to fiddle - with beer duties and the pottery industry - as the British economy flatlines. The inconvenient truth is that George Osborne has become Labour's greatest electoral asset.

George Osborne must resist the temptation to use the Budget unilaterally to try and force multinationals to pay more tax in the UK in an ill-considered way and without consultation. The wheels are already in motion internationally to address contentious issues such as so-called 'profit shifting' and other measures that erode the tax base.

If you need to find any evidence of the impact of the UK's economic problems, you really don't have to go too far. My food shop is the place where I personally have felt the pinch most profoundly, as inflation has played havoc with the price of my weekly trip to the supermarket.

As the prime minister and leading commentators have been fond of pointing out - and rightly so - employment is now back to pre-crisis levels, making this one of the few economic indicators not keeping the Chancellor up at night. Yet step back from a narrow focus on the number of people in work and the challenge we face on employment is daunting.

We are living in the midst of an economic meltdown, which as the latest economic figures reveal is being made worse not better by a Chancellor whose incompetence and mendacity is now beyond doubt.

If GDP also shrinks in the first quarter of 2013, then the economy will be back in technical recession - the third recession in the space of five years. However, this still remains speculation. We will not know for sure whether the economy is back in recession for another three months.

Britain's recovery slammed into reverse at the end of last year after the economy contracted by a worse-than-expected 0.3%, official figures revealed ...

The market expected cuts to growth and that is what we got. Likewise news of rising debt and an increased period of austerity did not come as a surprise to sterling markets, with both the pound and the yield on UK debt remaining largely ambivalent to the Chancellor's speech.

A crackdown on "time wasting" legal challenges to Government policies will be promised by David Cameron on Monday as part of efforts to boost economic...

Britain's recession is already the longest since records began. Even with today's positive figures, it will be 2014 before the UK economy returns to its previous peak. But don't bet against further bad news ahead.

IMF economists have finally acknowledged what politicians have long denied. They have shown that austerity policies implemented by politicians and demanded by financial markets are severely damaging to what economists define as 'growth'. Ultimately, argues the IMF, these policies are self-defeating. As most thinking people now recognise, rather than repairing the broken and bankrupt economies of the world, austerity is making matters worse.

Everyone agrees growth since 2010 in the UK has been very disappointing. But there has been much debate about why - was it cutting the deficit too quickly, was it the spike in inflation resulting from commodity price rises, was it the impact on confidence from the eurozone?