Every winter, the media comment on the challenges that the NHS faces during the cold season. We have reported on this in the past, and 2018 is no different. The…
Northern Ireland has been in a precarious political situation ever since the partition of Ireland in the 1920’s. Years of political instability, paramilitary warfare, and social divides have left the…
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, presented his Autumn Budget to Parliament on 22 November 2017. Compared to what happened in Spring 2017, this time the Chancellor described a…
The size of the digital economy The digital economy represents a relevant quota of global wealth. According to Accenture, it counted for 22.5% of worldwide GDP in 2015, with a…
Of all the economic implications the European Union has on the world market, few policies have been debated and criticised more than the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Through this…
The two major Parties in UK have recently concluded their annual conferences. After the positive performance in the last election, the Labour Party appears to have found internal cohesion and…
Until the 1970s, Venezuela was regarded as a relatively well functioning democracy with relatively well-developed market economy. For decades, Venezuela took the top spot in Latin America regarding wealth. Today…
French Europeanism In April, the European establishment and business communities welcomed the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the French Republic. The election was interpreted as a positive sign…
The purpose of the state pension regime in the UK is to ensure a basic pension to those who have paid reasonable contributions (via national insurance taxation) during their work life. It is essentially a system that attempts to ensure a subsistence income after retirement. The regime is an opt-out system: workers can decide to leave the state pension regime and receive a rebate on national insurance contributions. The current rebate, however, in not enough to incentivise significant numbers of workers to leave the state pension and look for alternative pension funds. Anticipating the pension age increase not only is just a palliative solution to a systemic problem of the pension regime, but it also unfair.
In many markets, there is a common phenomenon that, for a given change in costs, prices tend to rise more quickly when costs increase than they fall when costs decrease. As evident in some recent price rises in the UK energy market, this “rockets and feathers” pricing pattern is often claimed as evidence of collusion and followed by calls for greater regulation. However, there are other more competitive explanations and so care is needed when considering a potential remedy.
