Some pro-Brexit MPs will not vote for the government's proposed Withdrawal Agreement because of its fine print: they think it will be written in indelible tablets of law that we can never change. But they forget that sovereign states will not indefinitely stay in treaties that do not suit them,...

Public spending devolution in practice is widely seen as more appropriate for addressing varied political aspirations within state boundaries than is tax devolution. A drawback is that devolved public spending may be subject to irresistible upward pressure, as illustrated by 'formula drift' of...

The UK has been a net debtor over the past two decades and the sterling exchange rates are sensitive to any chaos that might occur in the Financial market. This paper examines the importance of the inter-national financial imperfections in the sterling exchange rate dynamics. We build a small...

This paper assesses UK innovation policy impact on a large, population weighted, sample of both service and manufacturing SMEs. By focussing on self-reported innovation the study achieves a wider coverage of the effects of SME innovation policy than possible with more traditional indicators....

We investigate whether the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL) can explain UK inflation in the 1970s. We confront the identification problem involved by setting up the FTPL as a structural model for the episode and pitting it against an alternative Orthodox model; the models have a reduced...

It has been widely argued that inflation persistence since WWII has been widespread and durable and that it can only be accounted for by models with a high degree of nominal rigidity. We examine UK post-war data where after confirming previous studies findings of varying persistence due to...

This paper extends Meenagh and Minford (2021) to the four waves of infection in the UK by end-2021, using the unique newly available sample-based estimates of infections created by the ONS. These allow us to estimate the e§ects on the Covid hospitalisation and fatality rates of vaccination and...

Monetary developments of recent decades began with much promise with inflation targeting by independent central banks; the financial crisis of 2007 ushered in a period of great monetary instability. There are lessons for a return to more stability. Central banks need to stabilize money supply...