Apportioning the causes of the UK growth shortfall

Take the basic non-growth of the UK economy since 2008 (productivity, real wages, per capita gdp) and compare it to their peer countries (which are those?).  If you had to assign the causes of that shortfall to various factors, how would you do it?

Recently I had lunch with a few well-informed Brits, and they were suggesting that NIMBY was responsible for at least half the problem.  I thought I would give my mental estimates, and see what general opinion on the question looks like.  Such an exercise never can be very accurate, but at the very least it is a good way to calibrate world views.  Here goes!

1. The UK economy not specializing in making things that either foreigners or its own citizens want to buy.  In other words, trends turned against the country.  Its brand of European/global finance and business services just didn’t do that well.  Where were the major tech companies?  Was it in the right segments of manufacturing at the right time?  (For part of that period, Germany was. The Netherlands still is.)  Did it ride any boom in resource prices, as Australia and Canada did?  No.

50 percent.  Over the decades, I see growth rates move around so much, even when policies don’t change much, that this is usually my #1 culprit.

2. Brexit: 20 percent.

3. NIMBY: 15 percent.

4. Lack of cheap energy, energy building restrictions: 10 percent.

5. General decrepitude of some of the population somehow mattering more than before: 5 percent.  Keep in mind we are trying to explain the recent growth gap here, not theorizing about levels.  Otherwise it would be more.

Those are just guesstimates folx, what do you all think?

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