Back in 2014, several European countries started including the revenues from drugs and prostitution into their national accounting systems. These two sectors have several characteristics in common. First, the consumption…
Working Paper Series
Tax policies in Poland, Slovakia, and Bulgaria: sitting on a ticking bomb or catching up with the West?
WP 2016-03. The paper has now been published and can be accessed here. After the end of communism, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe shared very similar challenges. Despite…
An historic decentralization deal in England There is historically in England a North/South division. In the South, trade and financial services have made London the target of international investments and…
Online Articles
The Intellectual Property Rights Battle in the era of the Mass Customisation Revolution
Addictive Manufacturing (AM) is the name adopted in industries whose production is defined by the use of large scale 3D printing techniques. 3D printing is a technology which builds three-dimensional…
A deteriorated banking sector in a worn-out economy At the beginning of 2016, in the context of the new EU legislation on “bail in”, Italy found itself unprepared to face…
Working Paper Series
The confluence of ideas and interests in the process of rent destruction: the case of UK tax policy 1979-1997
WP 2016-02. Most of the literature on rent-seeking and the size of government expenditure has focused on the mechanisms through which policy-makers gather the necessary majorities to justify and expand…
How is NHS coping with winter? Winter is historically, and not surprisingly, a very challenging time for the UK National Health System, NHS, due to lower temperatures and the spread…
The UK labour market at the beginning of 2016 is in a rather good shape. The rate of unemployment has decreased steadily in the last two years and is now…
The European Union has experienced an increase in asylum applications for several
years, with 2014 seeing 570,800 applications, an increase of 47% compared to 2013.
The year-to-year increase in applications will be even more pronounced in 2015.
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland alone expect 1.3
million applications in 2015 — a new high since the Balkan crisis of the 1990s.
Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the 21st century” was dubbed as “blockbuster”. But for a group of French intellectuals under the lead of IREF, a free market institute in Paris, it was important to demonstrate that the French economist’s “Capital” did not deserve its commercial success. “Anti-Piketty” is a collection of essays by renowned international economists and historians, critical of Thomas Piketty’s volume.