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Spending review 2013

psi310398 said:
I'm afraid the countries you quote might be able to afford big public sectors because of luck rather than domestic political arrangements.

Which is not to say that the way GDP in the USA is distributed - leading to very poor helath outcomes, crappy infrastructure etc - should make many American taxpayers question what kind of system they are supporting. There seems very little in it for the ordinary Joe...

Re your table, we really need to ask what is driving the figures. And some countries do not in fact have very large public sectors as a percentage of population or GDP:

Luxembourg - so small as to be statistically insignificant. It wealth derives from being positively hosed down with EU taxpayer cash. It doesn't actually do or produce very much else.
Qatar - oil
Norway - oil. The same amount of oil as the UK to share among five million people. Average working week is 27 hours.
Switzerland - looking after other people's money, quite a lot of manufacturing and a tiny public sector
Australia - minerals and a small public sector
UAE - oil, most work done by non-nationals and state sinecures for locals supported by oil.
Sweden and Denmark - suffering deep cuts to public sector as tax base cannot sustain it, but for decades models to support your argument.
Canada - minerals and other natural resources out of all proportion to population and not a particularly large public sector anyway
Singapore - like Switzerland

Peter
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Originally it was just the Nordics that were highlighted, I have posted this numerous times to get a response from La Mescalito but to no avail. I take your point about Norway, as regards Sweden and Denmark, they may be suffering cuts in spending but there is nowhere that looks like Detroit or many other cities in the US. Neither country has reserve currency status and are not able to borrow anywhere near the scale of the US. I am fed up of private good public bad, its just whether resources are allocated intelligently that matters and to claim private/public is better than other is a facile argument as far as I am concerned.
 
russel said:
I am fed up of private good public bad, its just whether resources are allocated intelligently that matters and to claim private/public is better than other is a facile argument as far as I am concerned.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Whatever works in given circumstances seems quite a sensible approach.

I can't speak for Sweden and Denmark but I do know Norway well and I'd say that the oil wealth does rather insulate them against the consequences of some rather extravagant resource allocation. I rather suspect that the Swedes and the Danes believed that there was a Scandinavian effect when, in reality, there was a Norwegian and to a more limited degree Danish oil and gas effect.

In Norway, the principle of universality is such that a rural hospital with perhaps twenty under-fives in its catchment still has a fully staffed paediatric facility, for example. They must be rather skilled at sudoku by now...

And in rural Norway it is not unknown to see a new two mile tunnel cut through a mountain from a small town to a village of some fifty people. Under any kind of investment appraisal that I know and with any kind of hurdle rate above zero, these simply would not be built.

It is clear that they really are running out of things to spend money on and many projects are there simply to keep people employed.

Would that the UK were ever so lucky to have this problem.
 
Mescalito said:
Usually because a supply of seawateer is not handy. Offshore, seawater is used.

Each well will use about 2 olympic swimming pool's worth every year.

Chris
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This article suggests 5m Gallons per well or approx 15 Olympic sized pools although how significant that would be in the UK, I don't know. In a time of drought obviously more significant than during a summer such as last year's.

http://www.theenergycollective.com/...ow-much-water-does-fracking-shale-gas-consume
 
pure sound said:
This article suggests 5m Gallons per well or approx 15 Olympic sized pools although how significant that would be in the UK, I don't know. In a time of drought obviously more significant than during a summer such as last year's.

http://www.theenergycollective.com/...ow-much-water-does-fracking-shale-gas-consume
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I got my figures from an Internal report produced by one of the major oil companies.

But let's consider another aspect of water use. Mull was advocating a return to coal extraction. In the same article you linked to, the following interesting snippet appeared:

"The recent shale gas transformation of the U.S. natural gas industry has also focused attention on the water-energy nexus, although the water consumption for the production of shale gas appears to be lower (0.6 to 1.8 gal/MMBtu) than that for other fossil fuels (1 to 8 gal/MMBtu for coal mining and washing, and 1 to 62 gal/MMBtu for U.S. onshore oil production)"

Chris
 
Mescalito said:
The micro quakes caused by fraccing are tiny, Greg. Akin to a lorry passing outside.

And compre that to the damage caused by mining subsidence.

Chris
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Chris, you seem to be freestyling...

auric said:
And yet more news;

http://www.nature.com/news/energy-production-causes-big-us-earthquakes-1.13372
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/1225942
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/164
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/07/10/science.1239213

via /.

But alas I am in no position to weigh these citations against the Guardian and other press offerings :( but others may well be :)
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Greg said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jul/11/fracking-water-injection-major-earthquakes
Click to expand...

<sad face>
 
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