THE Government’s economists knew that some of their work might be inpenetrable for the general reader, so they recruited Goldilocks and her ursine chums to explain Modelling the transition to EMU to the masses. Or that was the idea anyway.

One of the 18 studies sets out the “Three Bears Model”. It involves three countries: one large, one medium and one small. The smallest bear represents Britain, the middle-sized one is the euro area and Daddy Bear morphs into the rest of the world. It fails, however, to tell us which one is just right, but if the Goldilocks analogy were extrapolated, Baby Bear would do just fine staying as he is.

The study by Peter Westaway explains that the Goldilocks model has been specifically developed “to analyse the output-inflation process of the UK economy inside and outside EMU. It is based on a conventional simplification of the monetary transmission mechanism as commonly used for the purposes of macroeconomic policy analysis.”

The study then directs readers to six pages of small-print equations explaining the model in detail. For a more “complete” description the reader must study Modelling Shocks and Adjustment mechanisms in EMU. But there the easy stuff ends. The other documents are as dense as tropical undergrowth, bursting with brain-defying jargon.

Whether describing how the City works, defining a short-term interest rate, or assessing the impact of EMU convergence on business, the language is more Whitehall farce than sensible advice to an anxious electorate. Sometimes, it is just gobbledegook. On the location of financial activity, for example: “Path dependency means that clusters can persist for long periods of time, even when initial cause for their development is no longer an explanatory factor for their current position.”

At other times, the civil servants show a distinct naivety. On the direction of exchange rates, they opine: “Predicting short-term movement in exchange rates is very difficult and many people attempt to make money from doing so.”

Often, the Treasury’s economists go out of their way to state what they do not know, rather than what they do. They deduce: “It is not possible to say whether macroeconomic volatility in the UK will increase or decrease compared to outside (the euro).”

To understand their explanation of the City’s success, a physics A level would help: “For the financial centre to grow, centripetal forces need to outweigh centrifugal forces.” When in doubt about one question, the economists like to ask another: “It is difficult to pin down the concept of an equilibrium exchange rate more precisely without first asking why it is an interesting concept.”

And when finally stuck for words, they resort to mathematics, with graphics, bar charts and equations. But for all those who may have trouble remembering the details of the National Changeover Plan, the papers provide a handy mnemonic: Do Remember The Right Timetable at Every Stage. D = decision day; R = referendum; T = wholesale markets conversion; R = retail transition; E = euro day (coinage) S = Sterling, its death!