This article uses panel data to investigate the extent of income-related inequity in the likelihood of visiting a General Practitioner (GP), specialist, dentist and hospital among individuals aged 65 years and over in the UK. The probability of accessing health care is predicted with separate...

My essay surveys a range of printed secondary sources going back to publications of the day (and includes research in primary sources) in order to revive a traditional and unresolved debate on economic connexions between the French and Industrial Revolutions. It argues that, on balance, the...

The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by 1815. Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by economists as...

The recession of 2008-2009 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other post-war recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of...

One potential channel through which the effects of the minimum wage could be directed is that firms who employ minimum wage workers could have passed on any higher labour costs resulting from the minimum wage in the form of higher prices. This study looks at the effects of the minimum wage on...

Over the last decade the British Labour Government has presided over unprecedented increases in levels of spending on the National Health Service (NHS). But Opposition parties now claim that this record growth in NHS expenditure has been misspent, and some commentators are already predicting...

One of the many miracles of Victorian Britain’s market economy was that it worked most efficiently when it was left to regulate itself – or at least, this is what the great majority of Victorians believed. The prevailing economic orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century assumed, following...

This thesis traces the development of the copper industry, mining and smelting, located mainly in Cornwall and South Wales respectively, between 1760 and 1820, and the interaction between them. It is especially concerned with the impact on the mining industry of new sources of ore, technological...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the evolving relationship between the British trading company John Swire and Sons and its Chinese partners involved in the distribution of its products, notably sugar. From the nineteenth century, Swire had utilised the Chinese system of the Comprador....

Two years have now elapsed since the tech-stock share bubble burst ? most notably on the NASDAQ in New York, but engulfing other high-tech markets as well. In Britain, as in other countries, the overall stock market environment has been relatively bearish in the intervening period. The two...