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…
Public spending
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…
Working Paper Series
And Yet It Grows. Crisis, Ideology, and Interventionist Policy Ratchets
by
IREF
WP 2017-05. Discussions on the optimal level of government intervention in the economy have become very intense in recent years, especially following the 2008 financial and economic crisis. The hardships…
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…
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.
Since the introduction of the Euro in 1999 the European Central Bank sets the main refinancing rate for the whole Eurozone and therefore decides at which conditions banks can take…
After the recent disappointing performance in the last elections, the UK government led by Theresa May has revived the Northern Powerhouse project. The project aspires to make the North of…
As we recently pointed out, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Phillip Hammond, was left aside by the Conservative party during the last campaign for parliamentary elections. With him,…
On the 8th of June UK citizen will vote to elect a new Parliament in a snap election called by current Prime Minister Theresa May. The very short campaign so…