Before I started working full-time at the IEA, I wrote a dissertation on poverty in developed economies. At the time, the state of the social policy literature was easily summarised. Developed ...

Britain has suffered a catastrophic decline in welfare performance, falling to 22nd place in life expectancy and ranking just 15th overall despite a record tax burden and ballooning welfare spending ...

Each year, the Government publishes international energy price comparisons. The data is sourced from the IEA and covers industrial and domestic gas and electricity prices. The latest data for 2023 was ...

Introductory Remarks In recent decades, economics and related policy sciences have taken what might be called a ‘behavioural turn’. Once-dominant theories of rationality and human behaviour have been ...

The UK’s trade patterns with the EU fail to show a Brexit effect, either since the referendum or the end of the transition period. Trade continued to grow between 2016 and the conclusion of the Brexit ...

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Booth-BBC-Interactive.pdf In the past, the use of a compulsory levy on television sets (a licence fee) to finance the ...

The policy reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic will increase budget deficits massively in all the world’s leading countries. The deficits will to a significant extent be monetised, with heavy state ...

The branch of economics that studies preferences and choices as they relate to costs and benefits is the natural starting point – indeed the only apparent candidate for a rational starting point – for ...

‘Market failure’ is a term widely used by politicians, journalists and university and A-level economics students and teachers. However, those who use the term often lack any sense of proportion about ...

As Fidel Castro progressed slowly toward Havana in the first days of 1959, he was met by huge crowds of enthusiastic supporters. The ex-president, Fulgencio Batista, had fled in the early hours of New ...

The National Health Service enjoys strong support among the public, making it almost impossible to introduce radical reforms, even if the performance of the NHS is relatively poor compared with ...

When this blog was launched over a decade ago, most of my articles were rebuttals of the latest nonsense I had read in the Guardian or the Independent. Those publications are, unfortunately, still ...