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 ...

From the price of a steel girder, to the fertiliser you put on your lawn and all the way down to the electricity you use, if it produces CO2 to make it, you need to pay for the CO2. But how? A complex ...

This article was first published on the Institute of Economic Affairs Substack. Official figures recently published by HMRC indicate a huge rise in illicit tobacco sales in the UK since 2021. The ...

Margaret Thatcher herself reportedly slammed The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek on a desk at a Conservative Party meeting, declaring “This is what we believe!” This Government may not share Thatcher ...

I was recently watching the video “Are Populists Destroying Democracy?” on the IEA’s Youtube channel, in which the IEA’s Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz interviewed Swedish political scientist ...

The Government’s own impact assessment for its employment rights legislation estimates that the measures could cost businesses up to £5 billion annually. To start, this is a substantial amount. Past ...

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 ...

While most people would probably agree that individuals should be free to consume adult entertainment even if others find it morally objectionable, few would argue that children should have access to ...

Until very recently, Britain’s National Health Service used to be beyond argument. The reverence for the health service often precluded anything resembling a rational discussion around it: the social ...

The overview highlights the academic consensus on harmful consequences. Most studies (56 out of 65) find that rent controls succeed in lowering rents for controlled units, as intended. However, 14 out ...

Colonialism and the slave trade were, at best, minor factors in Britain’s prosperity and may have been net lossmakers. An increasingly prominent anti-capitalist narrative claims that empire and ...

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 ...