April 21, 2010
The current controversy over the national debt in Britain is as usual totally ahistorical. Fortunately, the British office of National statistics has excellent historical data on the national debt going all the way back to 1855. I reproduce a portion of that data courtesy of them to drive home the point that the current hysteria over debt levels in the UK and elsewhere is absolutely foolhardy and quite simply reveals historical ignorance at work. The current Feb. 2010 ratio of the public sector net debt to GDP in the UK is 60.3 % If we exclude the financial interventions that the British government undertook to bail out the banks the ratio is only 52.6 %. The larger figure of debt amounts to 857.5 billion pounds and the figure excluding financial interventions is 741.6 billion pounds. Is this ratio somehow a disaster ? The answer must be clearly no when we compare it to the historical data since 1916.
Year U.K. National Debt as % of GDP
1916 61 %
1917 90
1918 114
1919 136
1920 133
1921 150
1922 170
1923 180
1924 176
1925 167
1926 175
1927 167
1928 165
1929 162
1930 162
1931 173
1932 177
1933 183
1934 177
1935 168
1936 162
1937 150
1938 147
1939 141
1940 121
1941 131
1942 149
1943 168
1944 194
1945 232
1946 252
1947 245
1948 217
1949 201
1950 197
1951 178
1952 164
1953 154
1954 149
1955 141
1956 134
1957 126
1958 121
1959 117
1960 110
1961 106
1962 103
1963 101
1964 93
1965 87
1966 84
1967 81
1968 81
1969 74
1970 67
1971 60
1972 58
1973 52
1974 50
1975 46
1976 47
1977 48
1978 49
1979 46
1980 43
1981 46
1982 44
1983 43
1982 45
1983 43
1984 45
1985 46
1986 44
1987 46
1988 44
1989 39
1990 35
1991 35
1992 36
1993 40
1994 46
1995 50
1996 52
1997 53
1998 50
Source: British Office of National Statistics http.wwwstatistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_other/GSSmethodology_ No12_V2pdf
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