old people ’ s home does. driving your children to hospital is not volunteering, but driving your neighbours to hospital is. and so on. figure 3 gives some more examples taken from the ilo manual. given this definition, measuring volunteering activity is likely to be a tricky business. would you know how many hours you had spent over the past year helping your neighbours? those london commuters might know – a roundish number? – but the rest of the uk population is unlikely to keep score. household surveys can help. in the uk, the community life survey and the british household panel survey ( bhps ) ask respondents about the nature and scale of their volunteering activities. although far from perfect, they enable us to build up a good overall picture of the volunteering sector. and what a picture they paint. first, the volunteer army in the uk is huge. figure 4 illustrates the extent of participation in voluntary activities in 2012, based on the community life survey. around 44 % of respondents had done some form of formal voluntary work over the previous 12 months and 29 % volunteer formally at least once a month. this means around 15 million people in the uk volunteer “ frequently ”. looking at hours worked, this equates to just over 2 billion hours per year spent formally volunteering. to give you some context, that is just under one hour per week for every person over 16 in the uk. it is 5 % of the total hours worked in the uk by paid employees. it is equivalent to 1. 25 million full - time equivalents ( ftes ), or double the number of paid ftes in the voluntary sector. 4 put differently, there are around the same number of fte volunteers in the uk as there are paid employees in the manufacturing, construction and real estate sectors combined. indeed, the only industrial sectors with a larger uk workforce are wholesale and retail services, education, health and social work. and it does not end there. it is estimated that another 170 million hours a year are volunteered by people less than once a month. 5 and to this estimate of formal volunteering should be added measures of informal volunteering. according to calculations recently released by the ons, informal volunteers provide anywhere between 1. 7 and 2. 1 billion hours of extra help each year. 6 so, all in, volunteering in the uk might amount to as much as 4. 4 billion hours per year. that is 1. 7 hours per week for every uk adult

and low unemployment could be achieved if we were only willing to accept somewhat higher inflation. but it was gradually recognised that there was no such trade - off. the absence of a nominal anchor was one of the main reasons behind the pronounced swings in the norwegian economy. with a policy of low interest rates and devaluations, inflation took root. nominal interest rates were kept at a low level even though inflation rose. frequent devaluations from 1976 were unable in the long term to prevent a decline in the manufacturing sector. on the contrary, they proved to be self - reinforcing. the wide fluctuations culminated in a credit boom in the mid - 1980s. the fluctuations were reinforced by oil price shocks and the use of expected revenues from oil production. the government began already in the 1970s to budget on the basis of future strong growth in petroleum revenues. the result was that we spent a large share of our petroleum wealth in the 1970s and 1980s. welfare schemes were expanded significantly. manufacturing industry was scaled back. the recession after the credit bubble burst and oil prices fell in 1986 was deep. the recession was deeper than would have been the case if we had maintained a larger and competitive manufacturing sector. norwegian industry lost export market shares in the late 1980s in spite of the booming conditions abroad and substantial capacity slack at home. it was recognised that a substantial revision of economic policy would be necessary and that the problems created by inflation had to be taken seriously. the exchange rate was chosen as the nominal anchor in 1986. a fixed exchange rate was an intermediate target for achieving low and stable inflation. inflation fell gradually to 2 - 3 per cent in 1991 - 1992. we had to abandon the fixed exchange rate policy in 1992. an important reason was the weakness inherent in the fixed exchange rate regime in a world with free capital flows and deep financial markets. the krone exchange rate showed, however, little change to begin with and rapidly found a new range. a formal inflation target for monetary policy was introduced in the spring of 2001. the operational target of monetary policy as defined by the government is inflation of close to 2. 5 per cent over time. many countries had already gained many years ’ experience in operating such a system. new zealand was the first in line towards the end of the 1980s. canada followed shortly thereafter. developments over the past 40 years illustrate that the most important contribution monetary policy can make to sound economic developments in the long term is low and stable inflation. this provides the economy with a nominal anchor.