Hello everyone and welcome to this latest episode of our Brexit and Beyond podcast, and I'm delighted today to welcome Helen Thompson,

Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge,

also known to many of you, I imagine, as half of the double act that presents the Talking

Politics podcast. Helen, welcome. Thank you, Anon. Pleasure to be here. First and foremost, let me get

this out of the way. Helen's got a new book out that we should all buy. It's called Disorder,

hard times in the 21st Century, and we're going to come back to it in a bit. But there are a few things I want

to sort of talk through to you about the state of the world, which probably fit in with the book

as well, Alan. The first is, I mean, you're a political economist, which basically as far as I can

figure it out, means that you're a specialist on everything. I wouldn't quite put it like that.

So I'm going to test this assumption now.

So let's talk about the world economy first, because the world economy is very much in the headlines.

There's a debate going on at the moment about whether current levels of inflation,

particularly in the big industrial economies, are a reflection of a structural shift or just a short-term trend. What do you reckon? I think there's two different things going on. I think that there is clearly a short-term issue that's probably not, to be honest, as clear as it was in the late autumn before we got to

Omicron and the recovery, the economic recovery got hit by that. And that is as we come out of the

at least pandemic economic conditions, let's put it that way, there's going to be considerable

amount of supply side

disruption I think in terms of this aspect of it how short-term it is is probably

complicated by the issue of whether there's really been a significant change in

certain labour markets of people taking themselves out of labour markets. I think there's some evidence

that that is the case, at least in some countries. So it may be that we need to adjust to a,

like a want-off labour shock as we come out of pandemic economic conditions. And in that sense,

I kind of have some sympathy with the sort of inflation transitory position,

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