lifestyle

February 6, 2024

Q.E.D. Why Politicians Need an Evidence-based Approach to Policy Problems

Poor policymaking has significantly contributed to Europe’s challenges across various fields. Despite politicians’ professed commitment to evidence-based policymaking, the paper highlights how decisions are infected by populism and short-termism.
June 1, 2017

Is the Spanish Job Creation Model Fragile? The Case of Tourism

The situation on the Spanish labour market is being debated by specialists and policy makers with respect to two central questions: on the one hand, the type of employment that is being generated following the crisis and, on the other hand, the medium-to-long term sustainability of this job creation.
March 1, 2017

Cheap as Chips: is a Healthy Diet Affordable?

It is widely believed that healthy eating is relatively expensive whereas ‘junk food’ is relatively cheap. This has led to an assumption that poor diets and obesity are directly caused by economic deprivation.
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.
October 1, 2016

Innovation in Food Labelling

According the European Commission, a Geographical Indication (GI) is “a distinctive sign used to identify a product as originating in the territory of a particular country, region or locality where its quality, reputation or other characteristic is linked to its geographical origin.” Under the system of GIs, the European Union has protected over 3,300 food and wine names with, as of 2010, an estimated value of €54.3 billion.
April 1, 2016

Prospects for Agricultural Reform in the EU

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is today the EU’s most expensive policy, taking up almost half of the annual budget. It is also its most interventionist and complex policy. Multiple reforms have created a system of decoupled payments to farmers that protect and prolong the life of small-scale farms and constrain large-scale farming and the evolution towards a more efficient industry structure.
June 1, 2012

A World Waiting for Antibiotics: Six Reasons Why Antibiotics Resistance Plagues the World

Every year, between 180 and 260 people in Sweden die as a result of antibiotic resistance. Responsibility for increasing antibiotic resistance is often placed on doctors and consumers. It is argued that customer-oriented physicians and self-serving patients are driving the problem through increased prescribing.