Since the mid-twentieth century, development economists have identified barriers to economic growth including financing a savings-investment gap, planning investments, and institutional change. Efforts to overcome these development barriers range from centralised planned intervention to...

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a wide ranging personal data protection regime of greater magnitude than any similar regulation previously in the EU, or elsewhere. In this paper, we outline how the GDPR impacts the value of data held by data collectors before proposing some...

Blockchain (distributed ledger technology) is an institutional technology that allows trust to be manufactured instead of being earned. Trust is an important component of business and trade and has previously been subsumed into information costs. It is only now that the importance of trust is...

Agriculture is the production of food, fibre and data. The data attests to the qualities and properties of the food and fibre, and is therefore economically valuable. Yet while data is cheap to add, it is often costly to verify. In consequence, a significant percentage of the final cost of...

In this paper we outline the economics of healthcare as a problem of coordinating data and examine how blockchain technology might be applied as new economic infrastructure to govern those data rights. We argue that blockchain as a technology of trust pushes the economic organisation of...

Web3, underpinned by blockchain technology, is an evolution of digital infrastructure, whereby protocol-enforced consensus mechanisms facilitate the direct (that is, peer-to-peer) exchange of value between users, removing the need for trusted intermediaries. Existing blockchain experiments seek...

The 2020 global pandemic abruptly brought into question many of our social, economic and political institutions. COVID-19 is more than a public health crisis—as economies and states falter there are deep questions about the resilience and robustness of our political and economic systems. Are...

We propose a new type of commons – an ‘innovation commons' – that is an emergent institutional solution to ‘the innovation problem' (defined as a collective action problem, not a market failure problem). In an innovation commons entrepreneurs pool innovation resources (i.e. inputs into...

This paper presents the rationale and method for a new model of innovation policy by regional government that is based on the early detection of the emergence of new industry clusters. The approach takes advantage of regional governments' superior access to distributed information about the...