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.
Decisions on childcare arrangements were largely a private matter until the 1990s. A political consensus has since arisen that government action is needed to raise the quality of provision, to make it more affordable and to support parental labour market attachment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The European Union is all things to all people. To proponents on the right, it is a force for international cooperation, trade promotion and economic growth. To those on the left, it serves to enhance labour and environmental standards, to hold corporations to account, and to tackle problems which reach beyond national boundaries.
A tax on turnover would tax profitable and loss-making firms equally, potentially posing an insurmountable hurdle to struggling firms, and eliminating the tax benefit of normally beneficial capital expenditure.
A law banning short-term apartment rentals just came into force in Berlin. The measure, which was passed in 2014 but only entered into force on 1 May, is aimed at releasing housing for Berliners. In the words of Andreas Geise, the city’s head of urban development, the law is “a necessary and sensible instrument against the housing shortage in Berlin.”