liberalism

February 1, 2017

High-powered Reforms to EU Energy Policy

The achievement of efficient and secure energy supply and a clean environment do not have to be conflicting objectives. However, meeting both goals will require meaningful market-oriented reform of energy policy at the EU level.
February 1, 2017

The Taxation of High-income Earners: an International Comparison

The effective marginal tax rate is the total tax on the last euro earned, taking into account income tax as well as social contributions and consumption taxes. Considering only income taxes does not provide the whole picture of the distortionary effects of the tax system.
February 1, 2017

The Economics of Industry 4.0

Viewed over the sweep of history, concerns about technological unemployment have always proved overblown. Over the last two-hundred years, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed and it has substantially increased labour productivity and living standards.
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.
November 1, 2016

Google Shopping: the Arguments Revisited

The arguments on which the various competition cases against Google are being fought involve core features of economic interaction in multi-sided digital markets. As such, the final outcome will have a long-standing impact on platform innovation in the EU.
November 1, 2016

Last Call for TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is currently in a negotiatory limbo. Even though the European Commission has estimated such an agreement would increase the size of the EU economy by at least €120 billion (or 0.5% of EU GDP) and the U.S economy by €95 billion (roughly 0.4% of U.S GDP), the deal looks more uncertain than ever before.