In the 1980s and 1990s successive United Kingdom governments enacted a series of reforms to establish a more market-oriented economy, closer to the American model and further away from its Western European competitors. Today, the United Kingdom is one of the least regulated economies in the...

This Briefing Note considers recent trends in specialisation, outsourcing and offshoring of business services. Specialisation within a firm happens when a firm organises an activity in a specialised unit, for example, when a firm moves payroll activities out of the back office of a factory, and...