EconomicsWithAneesh

It was a great opportunity to be invited to Cambridge on Wednesday to meet with professor Watson a Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Fitzwilliam College, to be presented with a certificate of commendation on one of the essay competitions that I took part in. Whilst making our way to her office, I was impressed by the peaceful and rather scenic atmosphere at Fitzwilliam, compared to the rather busy campus at King's and Trinity that we saw earlier in the day. We were later told that the location was actually where Charles Darwin's wife lived in, before they donated their estate to the university. During our walk, I could not help but ask more about her recent research in world trade and protectionism. It is a topic that interests me, but something I know little about compared to her. Anna explained the concept so well, focusing in on multiple reasons for why Trade is so restricted, rather than simply just blaming it on Trump. We arrived at Anna's office and I ask...

  The Economic story of the world in the past four decades- Dr Ramin Nassehi "International convergence has overpowered national divergence. Therefore the world has become less unequal" Have we entered a new world economic (dis)order? Recent Us and China tensions with Trump and his tariffs are unprecedented. This is furthered with the rise of populism within countries. And what the professor named as the rise of: Anti-globalisation, Anti borders, Anti-elite But How did we get here? Looking at the back 40 years you see that hyper-globalisation has occured due to the free flow of goods and finance(stocks, shares).  The g rowth of world trade about 5 fold over income(gdp), and is attributed to containerisation, easier communication via internet, trade liberalisation.   Now lets question who are the main beneficiaries of increased income? Figure 1: The growth in divergence of inequality What figure one shows is that, out of 100 pounds u spend, 35 percent goes to rich.  I...

Introduction to kinetic theory: Kinetic theory explains how gases behave by looking at the movement of tiny particles: atoms or molecules. The theory, instead of tracking each particle one by one, uses probability to understand the average behavior of millions or billions of them. This means that, even though a basic physics lesson suggests that individual particles move randomly, their collective behavior follows predictable patterns. The pressure and temperature in a gas can be explained using kinetic theory, based on how often and how hard particles collide with a wall of a container [1]. The basic principle is that energy is transferred via (elastic) collisions. When two particles bump into each other, they exchange energy, but the total energy stays the same: conservation of energy. Over time, the energy spreads out evenly across the system, leading to thermal equilibrium: when there is no net transfer of thermal energy between them [2]. This concept was developed in...

The Spending Review: On Wednesday, Reeves laid out the latest Spending Review. Personally, I appreciated the government’s commitment to increasing defence spending; investing in national security is essential, especially in today’s global climate. However, I’m less convinced by the extension of free school meals to all families on Universal Credit. While well-intentioned, it risks expanding welfare too broadly and should be more targeted to those in real need. What actually is the spending review? The spending review is the process the government carries out to set the budgets for different department for the future, which occurs, at a minimum, once every three years. There are two main areas that this covers: current resource and capital spending. The former including day-to-day spending on aspects such as the NHS, education and defence and the latter including investment into energy security and infrastructure to drive economic growth across the country. In general we will see a ...

Introductory university lecture- The impact of tariff's on trade: A really nice lecture that showcased a different approach to research. I found the talk quite engaging and learned a lot from it. I hope to apply this type of research in my own work moving forward. So, lets get started, what was the talk about? And why was it interesting? There are two types of work that are carried out at universities: empirical and theoretical work. The former focuses more on data and creating models, whereas the latter consists of more assumptions. With data sets being increasingly more available, empirical work is a more common form of research.  Primarily, the focus of the lecture was on the US-China Trade war. With the 2025 trade war being quite recent, and therefore having a lesser so amount of data to work on, the researcher looked into the 2018/2019 trade war and hoped to make some parallels.  Figure one: The levels of tariffs between US and China Figure one shows an increase in tariff...