It has suddenly become fashionable to be concerned about China’s growth rate slowing down. This is not a matter of a short-run cyclical downturn, with normal service being resumed shortly as the economy roars ahead once more. It is a worry that there will be a permanent
Read more →Archive for the Public Policy Category
Criminals are refusing to leave Portugal’s prisons. According to the International Herald Tribune, prisoners are starting to want to serve the full amount of their sentences rather than be released on parole. This is despite the fact that there is record over-crowding and conditions inside are reported
Read more →What is the connection between the content of Boris Johnson’s speech this week to the CBI, tax avoidance and evasion, executive pay, petty crime and plagiarism by students? This is yet another one where economics can help us with the solution. Economists have long used the example
Read more →Michael Heseltine’s report on economic growth came out last week. It contains 89 recommendations. A mere 57 varieties, to recall the famous Heinz slogan, might have connected it more with popular culture. The report has already attracted a lot of comment, mainly that Lord Heseltine seems nostalgic
Read more →Corporation tax is very much in the news. Starbucks is merely the latest to be in the spotlight, having paid no corporation tax on more than £1billion of sales in the past three years. This became noteworthy when the Prime Minister himself declared he was unhappy with the
Read more →Andrew Mitchell, the government’s chief whip, remains in some difficulty after his exchange with the police at the gates of Downing Street. At the heart of the incident there is an objective reality. Either he used the word pleb, or he didn’t. Either the police were officious
Read more →The debate rages about whether the Chancellor should implement a Plan B, or C or D or even Z. There seems to be a plethora of alternatives. But many of them share a key common theme. Namely, that an increase in public spending will boost output in the economy
Read more →The current highly emotional debate about GCSE grades is not very enlightening. But what has happened tells us a lot about how incentives matter, how they affect outcomes. And at the same time, it shows that unless a proper set of social norms is in place, incentives
Read more →Health professionals are living with paradox—they seem to have a dark future of financial decompression—but they also have, opportunities to use an emerging model of healthcare. They have to meet a new challenge of providing improved service for patients with long term medical conditions which seems to
Read more →The call for more transparency is a compelling one. We should have more information, more easily available. Stuff should not be hidden away. I am generally a believer in all of this, and that people have greater ability to absorb and critique than they are given credit
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