The renationalisation of rail infrastructure has not been a success. Network Rail has been plagued by crisis after crisis, with major projects hit by delays, mismanagement and large cost overruns. Its problems echo those suffered by the inefficient nationalised industries of the post-war period....

Supporters of free markets often have a general feeling that there is too much regulation or that it is too intrusive, badly formulated, and ineffective. However, proponents of these positions are often lacking in empirical evidence and are susceptible to accusations of either exaggerating the...

European civil service law has emerged as an independent law branch relatively recently. At the EU level there were three categories of rules that regulate the public employees' activity, according tothe treaty type that established one of the top three communities (ECSC, EEC, EURATOM)....

While not formally a regulator in the strict sense, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) exercises de facto regulatory powers in retail financial services, as its rules and determinations direct the behaviours of firms. While intended to be independent, the FOS has a close relationship with the...

The Jamaica Labour Party won The 2003 Local Government Elections in 2003 by a landslide victory. During the 3 year period ALL members of the JLP Local Government have displayed the highest level of effective leadership as they have said and done all the right things. However in terms of...

This paper analyses the impact of asymmetric preferences with respect to inflation and output by policymakers on interest-rate reaction functions and test for their existence. A modified New Keynesian framework which makes it possible to identify the dominant type of asymmetry is developed and...

The main emphasis of labour policies in several EU countries seem to have been addressed during the period 1985-2005 to contain the increases of real wages, under the misleading belief that lower wages could lead the policies to get higher employment rates. We show that the main policies to...

In this contribution we link the recently re-discovered tendencies towards stagnation with the features of financialisation, which have started to dominate developed capitalist economies in the early 1980s. We review the main macroeconomic channels of transmission of financialisation-namely, the...

We characterize empirically the financial cycle using two approaches: analysis of turning points and frequency-based filters. We identify the financial cycle with the medium-term component in the joint fluctuations of credit and property prices; equity prices do not fit this picture well. We...

This paper analyses the impact of asymmetric preferences with respect to inflation and output by policymakers on interest-rate reaction functions and test for their existence. A modified New Keynesian framework which makes it possible to identify the dominant type of asymmetry is developed and...