In the past, the use of a compulsory levy on television sets (a licence fee) to finance the BBC could be justified given the problem of spectrum scarcity and the fact that television signals were a public good (i.e. there was effectively a zero marginal cost of an additional user receiving the...

Innovation is an important source of economic growth. It increases productivity and creates wealth by freeing up resources to be used for other activity and hence more output. Despite its economic importance, innovation is still not fully understood and is difficult to predict. In pre-modern...

The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is heavily discussed in the UK, with support and opposition from several parts of the political spectrum. This idea has been around for a long time and was first formulated more than two centuries ago. There have been several times when it has attracted...

Pandemics are a recurring feature of human history. The COVID-19 virus has several features that mean it poses a particularly severe challenge. It threatens to cause a collapse of hospital systems through a high number of serious cases arising in a short period of time, and this, rather than...

Major crises, such as wars and pandemics, have often been the occasion for radical reconstruction of the welfare system. It is very likely that the COVID-19 pandemic will also do this because it will bring discontent with the existing system to a head and reveal ts weaknesses, particularly as...

COVID-19 is provoking a major reorientation of American and European foreign policy. At the heart of this is their changing relationship with China. The pandemic has given rise to fears of a new Cold War, which are based on out-of-date assumptions and a misunderstanding of China’s motivations....

COVID-19 is exposing the fundamentally unsound nature of successive government policies and higher education institutions. Many institutions were in a weak financial position before the pandemic and are now facing a massive cash-flow crisis. These difficulties could permanently decrease the...

Prolonged droughts and depleting groundwater resources have been a serious challenge to the economy of province of Balochistan, Pakistan. Proliferation of tube-wells incentivized by government policy interventions and continued subsidy for electric tube-wells for agriculture and choice for...

Price controls across many sectors are currently being hotly debated. New controls in the housing market, more onerous minimum wages, minimum prices for alcohol, and freezes on energy prices are very high up the agenda of most politicians at the moment. Even without any further controls, wages,...