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Rola Khaleda, FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The author is the author of “Growth: Account” and an economic expert at Oxford University and the Kingss College of London

In normal times, the expectations related to public financing in the United Kingdom will be from the budget responsibility office, which is expected this month, along with the spring statement of the advisor, an important moment. This time, it’s seismic. The institution that was established to reduce bias in predicting public financing now finds itself a much greater role: the final ruling on whether the government’s plan to achieve its central mission – more economic growth – is the occasion.

This purpose was not supposed to be from OBR. It was established in 2010 by George Osborne, the consultant, designed to solve a different problem: that the public financing expectations in the official UK were not reliable. The Treasury had a strong incentive to massage these numbers better, whatever the political makeup of the government. The belief that the independent statistical authority would be free from this temptation. To this extent, OBR is a success story: its expectations seem less biased.

However, expectations about public financial resources in the United Kingdom also require expectations about the British economy – among them, which is expected to grow. If the economy flows happily, these numbers will only play a supportive role. But this economy is stagnant, the government has succeeded in changing its main priority, and the Ministry of His Majesty’s Treasury is no longer producing its official growth forecast. So OBR numbers were pushed into the spotlight.

Here, though, it is complications: OBR does not actually know what causes growth. In fact, no one does. The real causes of growth are one of the great economic thoughts. Hundreds of possible reasons have been identified: everything from tax cuts to infrastructure spending, and the number of frost days to the level of newspaper readers. Today, they remain a strong dispute between the various schools of thought, divided into deep political lines and dueling with each other.

With this in mind, the idea that OBR is somehow known enough to take every UK government policy Determine its effect on growth To one decimal point fictional. However, this is what he will try to do at the end of the month, with an enormous operation result. For example, a decrease from 0.1 percentage points in the possible OBR productivity growth expectations, for example, is estimated to create a 7 billion pounds hole in public financial resources-the equivalent of the entire Defra budget.

But do other countries also have no independent “financial monitoring”, such as OBR? Yes, many do, but their role tends to be different. Simply assessing official government forecasts or providing a alternative to sitting side by side. OBR actually produces. Chancellor Rachel Reeves went further, and explicitly baked OBR numbers in her new financial rules, making her forecasts final.

So we find ourselves in a strange world, where Reeves is advised not to do what you think will lead to growth, but instead to consider what is assumed to grow. Then she must simply do the largest possible than that, given its financial restrictions, so the expectations are better. In the ancient world, HMT has been motivated to include numbers; In the new, HMT is stimulated to distort policy.

What’s more, if Reeves decides to challenge OBR expectations in public places when it is published – you may say that she felt that her internal model did not pick up a properly growing strategy promise – it will not seem to be a legitimate intellectual dispute over the real causes of growth. It would be seen as a shameful attempt to avoid the same rules that it created to end the financial performance.

OBR has been created with good intentions. But she was a victim of her success. The difficult political rule has been reduced about one of the most disputed economic questions – what actually causes growth – to a technocratic account that has been largely taken from view.

What should we do? First of all, the uncertainty in the OBR growth expectations must be recognized more clearly: independence may reduce their bias, but it does not make it correct. Politicians should be bold enough to say that; OBR should be modest enough to agree.

On the other hand, the Treasury should consider re -introducing its growth forecast. This is not because they are likely to be more accurate than OBR, but because we need more general debate and disagreement in policy -making, and not less than it, if we want to find creative ways of current economic distress.

Finally, Reeves must reconsider its financial rules, maintain its original spirit – the current budget in balance, and the debts that decrease as a share of the economy – with the material modified so that it is not tightly linked to a set of accounts that, like all predictions, may be wrong.