Bridget releases report on the economic impact of High Speed Rail
Volterra’s senior partner Bridget Rosewell recently produced a report with Oxford University’s Tony Venables on the impact of new railway investments in the UK, in particular HS2. The paper looks at how to assess the potential benefits of higher speed and higher capacity connection between cities by rail. Much of the formal appraisal of HS2 to date […]
New frontiers in privatisation
Volterra Partner Paul Ormerod recently spoke at an Institute for Economic Affairs conference in Slovenia on New Frontiers in Privatisation. The delegates from countries in the former Soviet bloc were particularly enthusiastic! His talk was on ‘Evolutionary Approaches to Privatisation’ and can be found here. The political economy of further privatisation raises issues which are of fundamental importance for […]
Is the ‘rent-seeker’ dying out?
The concept of the “rent seeker” is one of the most valuable in the whole of economics. The activity of rent-seeking involves obtaining money by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activity takes place, instead of getting paid for creating new wealth. It is a part of public choice theory, for which […]
