Publications

January 1, 2017

Balancing the Economy: the Hand of Government or the Invisible Hand?

The past record of industrial policy in the UK is a catalogue of waste and ineffectiveness. By the end of the 1970s it was widely accepted that the strategy of attempting to pick winners and promoting national champions was fundamentally flawed.
January 1, 2017

Free to Move

People greatly overestimate the immigrant share of the population and many wrongly believe that openness to migration harms Britons’ job prospects, burdens public finances and services and makes housing prohibitively expensive.
January 1, 2017

The Solution to the Spanish Pension System

It is increasingly evident that public pensions are going to be hard to sustain in the future: the ratio of workers to pensioners is close to a historical low. The crisis has taken nearly two million contributors out of the system, and adds to another variable that proves a greater challenge and is even more difficult to reverse: demographics.
January 1, 2017

Obesity and the Public Purse

This is the first study to estimate the annual savings that overweight and obese people bring UK taxpayers by dying prematurely (in 2016 prices). Ignoring these savings leads to substantial overestimation of the true burden of elevated body mass index (BMI) to the taxpayer.
December 14, 2016

Personal Pensions in the European Union

The development of personal pensions at the national and cross-border levels is hindered by high compulsory payments to public pension funds, restrictions on the participation of the self-employed and the unemployed, rules governing access to retirement savings, taxation of retirement income and other national legal requirements.
December 14, 2016

Personal Pensions in the European Union

The development of personal pensions at the national and cross-border levels is hindered by high compulsory payments to public pension funds, restrictions on the participation of the self-employed and the unemployed, rules governing access to retirement savings, taxation of retirement income and other national legal requirements.
November 4, 2016

Hire Authority

In recent years, smartphone-enabled applications such as Uber have gone a long way to resolve the market imperfections which gave rise to taxi regulation in the past. GPS technology and Big Data have spurred market innovations which reduce informational asymmetries, facilitating transactions between passengers and drivers.
November 1, 2016

Living on Credit

November 30 marks Credit Day across the European Union. Credit Day is the day when member states’ central administrations exhaust their annual tax revenues and have to begin borrowing in order to meet their spending commitments for the rest of the year.

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EPICENTER publications and contributions from our member think tanks are designed to promote the discussion of economic issues and the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. As with all EPICENTER publications, the views expressed here are those of the author and not EPICENTER or its member think tanks (which have no corporate view).

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EPICENTER publications and contributions from our member think tanks are designed to promote the discussion of economic issues and the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. As with all EPICENTER publications, the views expressed here are those of the author and not EPICENTER or its member think tanks (which have no corporate view).

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