The rise in global oil prices observed since September 2010 results in part from the social and political instability in the Middle East and North African regions, and in part from longer-term trends reasserting themselves. The unrest sweeping Tunisia earlier this year spread over many surrounding nations, including some major oil producers, such as Algeria and, most significantly, Libya. The Middle East currently supplies about a third of world oil and possesses over half of the world's proven reserves. Clearly, instability in the region automatically raises worries of supply disruptions and possible oil shortage, stimulating speculation and driving world oil prices to new peaks. Speculators have a tendency to overshoot the impact of a supply shock, and in any case supply-driven spikes should remain temporary, fading away as political stability returns.

This paper uses plant-level estimates of total factor productivity covering 40 years to examine what role, if any, productivity has played in the decline of output share and employment in British manufacturing. The results show that TFP growth in British manufacturing was negative between 1973 and 1982, marginally positive between 1982 and 1994 and strongly positive between 1994 and 2012. Poor TFP performance therefore does not appear to be the main cause of the decline of UK manufacturing. Productivity growth decompositions show that, in the latter period, the largest contributions to TFP growth come from foreign-owned plants, industries that are heavily involved in trade, and industries with high levels of intangible assets.

Recent developments in the European Union have raised immigration as an issue, especially in the UK. There has been a large wave of migrants into the UK from Poland since its accession in 2004, and as Romania and Bulgaria are preparing to become members of the European Union on 1 January 2007, migration from the new member states to other EU countries has become even more a focus of attention. Concerns over potential immigration towards the old EU member states have been rising because the total population of Bulgaria and Romania is approximately 30 million, a similar size to Poland, and the standards of living in both countries are considerably lower than in the EU-15 member countries, or than in any of the current New Member States. Hence outward migration is more likely to be attractive. The scale of flows will depend upon any restrictions that might be imposed by other member states, but current estimates suggest that 2 million Romanians, for instance, are already at work in the core EU countries.

The NIESR's monthly GDP series is an innovative feature; most GDP estimates are published at an annual, or quarterly frequency at best. For purposes of dating the business cycle the availability of this series is an asset, unexploited until this paper. The paper applies a version of the standard business (or ‘classical’) cycle dating algorithm to the data, after light smoothing to remove outliers. Three classical cycles are detected in the period between the early 1970s and 2002, with turning points which are close to (but usually precede) classical cycle dating which does not benefit from the availability of monthly GDP, and instead relies on a ‘coincident’ indicator methodology. In addition the turning points of a deviation cycle are identified.

This paper provides an analysis of the trends in labour productivity and employment growth at industry level in the European Union and the United States during the 1990s. We analyse relationships for groups of industries, i.e. industries that produce ICT products and services, those that invest strongly in ICT, and those that make less intensive use of ICT. The main findings are that the inverse relationship between employment and productivity growth has been much more prominent in manufacturing industries than in services industries. Secondly, during the 1990s, this relationship has turned positive in many industries, in particular in ICT-producing industries and in ICT-using industries in the service sector. Finally, the employment-reducing effects of productivity growth have remained considerably stronger in Europe than in the US.

The economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis in the United States have produced over a number of years a series of models which amount to a reassertion of the short-run quantity theory of money. This theory has been summarised by Tobin as ‘in the short-run, nominal income is proportional to the supply of money, although changes in nominal income may affect output as well as prices’. In other words, it is postulated that in the short-run there is a large and rapid influence of monetary actions on nominal income relative to that of fiscal actions and, indeed, that fiscal action unaccompanied by changes in money has little net effect on national output even in the short-run. This is an extreme version of the monetarist position, given that most monetarists, including Friedman, choose to work in the framework of the long-run rather than the shortrun quantity theory.

Much of public policy-making has in recent decades been driven by the idea of evidence-based policy – policy rooted in the principles of social science and, more specifically, empirical validation based on social and behavioural science. This article argues that evidence-based policy, while helping to improve the design of policies aimed at changing individual behaviour, lacks a recognition that individual and group choices are embedded in social relationships and institutions. There is a risk of over-relying not only on probabilistic models that under-state our condition of ‘radical uncertainty’ but also on data and metrics that are disconnected from the everyday experience of workers and citizens whose needs and interests cannot always be measured or managed. Since uncertainty is a fundamental reality of both the economy and social life, policy-making needs robust conceptual narratives to make sense of numbers and provide a sound basis on which to make decisions allied to ethical judgements.

Financial crises, and in particular those of the past few years, have severe consequences for the affected economies. In this paper we analyse the impact of financial development and European financial integration on growth and we find no reversal of the growth benefits of financial development and integration in recent years. This highlights the economic cost of regulatory changes that would reverse European financial integration. We also find that, following a financial crisis, investment declines more in countries with a greater degree of uncertainty aversion, which can be informative for evaluating post-crisis economic performance.

The paper discusses the many reasons why housing policy can appear to be both incoherent and ineffective - with too many Departments involved each with different objectives and a plethora of policies pulling in different directions. Drawing on earlier research findings the paper discusses three examples which have impacted on tenure mix – the growth in the private rented sector where policy initiatives – except for unintended side effects – have been limited and market and macroeconomic pressures have dominated; a range of tax anomalies which provide inconsistent incentives and generate considerable costs to the economy; and the impact of specific policies which concentrate on supporting owner-occupation through new build initiatives. The paper concludes by asking whether housing policy is inherently unable to withstand the pressures placed on it by both politics and macroeconomic realities.

The completion of Mrs Thatcher's first ten years as Prime Minister stimulated many surveys of the economic policy of the government during that time in office (for instance Layard and Nickell 1989; Bean and Symons 1989). Authors writing at that time were concerned particularly to make comparisons with the performance of the predominantly Labour governments that had been in power during the previous economic cycle, running from 1973 to 1979.

On average, UK productivity performance in the decades leading up to the financial crisis was quite disappointing. Joining the EU was not to blame. Indeed, EU membership, which was an integral part of the Thatcher reform programme, had a significant positive impact. Over the long run, UK supply-side policies have been badly designed in various different ways. These design faults have not been the result of constraints imposed by EU membership but rather the consequence of domestic government failure. There is no reason to think that EU exit will lead, either directly or indirectly, to improvements in UK productivity outcomes.

In the article we explain the basis of a series of comparisons of the explanations of the major macroeconomic variables in the UK economy which we are undertaking in a research project financed by HM Treasury. We seek to explain why it is that, despite the apparent objectivity of econometric method, modellers of the economy have published widely differing results. We illustrate our method with findings from the study of exports of manufactured goods, which present some clear examples of the difficulties encountered throughout the project. Full results will be available from the Institute.

This paper examines national origin bias in professional basketball in both the North American National Basketball Association (NBA) and Spanish professional league (Liga ACB). Past studies into racial bias find mixed results. In contrast, our study provides consistent evidence that players born in the USA receive preferential treatment in both the USA and Spain in terms of receiving additional time on the court.

This study examines the saving and insurance behaviour of 386 Boston University (BU) employees who volunteered to receive financial planning based on ESPlanner (Economic Security Planner) — a detailed life-cycle financial planning model developed by Economic Security Planning, Inc. Because the employees received their own financial plan, they had a strong incentive to provide full and accurate financial information. Hence, the data appear to be of particularly high quality for studying saving and life insurance decisions.

ESPlanner recommends annual levels of consumption, saving, and life insurance holdings that smooth a household's living standard through time subject to the household not exceeding its self-ascribed borrowing limit. The programme treats housing and special expenditures as ‘off-the-top’, adjusts for economies in shared living and the relative costs of raising children, makes highly detailed tax and Social Security benefit calculations, and permits users who don't want a stable living standard to specify how they'd like their living standards to change through time.

Our findings are striking. First, the correlation between ESPlanner's saving and insurance prescriptions and the actual decisions being made by BU employees is very weak in the case of saving and essentially zero in the case of life insurance. Many employees are spending far more and saving far less than they should, while others are under-spending and oversaving. The same holds for life insurance. The degree of under-insurance seems particularly acute. Almost 13 per cent of those BU spouses who are secondary earners would experience a 40 per cent or greater drop in their living standards were their spouses to pass away in the near future. Another 13 per cent would experience a 20 to 40 per cent drop. Second, planning shortcomings are as common among high-income professors with significant financial knowledge as they are among low-income staff with limited financial knowledge. Third, two thirds of BU employees are not in a position to smooth their living standards without exceeding their debt limits.

An independent Scotland would be a small European state. Small states may be at a disadvantage in world markets but can also adapt successfully. There are different modes of adaptation, notably the market-liberal mode and the social investment state. Either mode is dependent on internal institutions, social relationships and modes of policymaking. It is not possible to pick and choose items of different models since they have an internal coherence. The Scottish White Paper on independence supports the social investment state. Scotland has some, but not all, of the prerequisites for this so that independence would require internal adaptation.

This paper investigates the effect of recent regulatory changes to the compulsory annuitisation of tax-privileged pension savings, on the demand for annuities and other retirement products. We find that the demand for annuities has fallen by almost 75 per cent from its peak in 2012, and the demand for income drawdown products has increased. There is some evidence that people at younger ages and with smaller pension pots are choosing not to annuitise, and hence the average size of an annuity purchase has increased.

This paper examines trends in the instability of personal incomes in Britain in terms of changes in the transitory variance and in volatility, measures that have received much recent attention in research about the USA. It is shown that, although US measures have trended upwards over the past two decades, there is no such trend in Britain between the early-1990s and the mid-2000s. Explanations for these differences are discussed.

This article analyses the implications of switching from unfunded to funded pension systems. It is plausible that in the long run and on average people would be better off if pensions were funded. But in the transition from an unfunded to a funded scheme funds need to be accumulated and that requires national saving to be higher. While deficit financing can, under certain circumstances, help spread the burden of the transition across generations the scale of extra debt that might be needed in many European countries is problematic in the context of Monetary Union. Ultimately, it is likely to prove hard to make significant headway towards greater funding of pensions in Europe without some people being worse off. The task is harder the more generous are existing state pensions, the more rapid is the ageing of the population and the more constrained is the government in using deficit financing. Given all this the UK is in a relatively good position (vis a vis rest of Europe) to complete a transition which, arguably, began almost twenty years ago. Things are much tougher on the Continent.

But there are more than transitional issues. Unfunded pension schemes can help people insure against shocks that affect particular generations and because such schemes often involve intra-generational redistribution (because linkage between contributions made and pensions subsequently received is often quite low), as well as inter-generational transfers, they can help compensate for missing insurance markets. A key question for those who advocate a complete move to funded schemes is how the redistributive and insurance roles that are played, to varying extents, by state-run, unfunded pension schemes could be achieved by other means.