The benefits of innovation are unpredictable and hard to quantify. Fear of adverse consequences can lead to excessive emphasis on risk avoidance, leading to regulation that holds back beneficial innovation. The experience in tobacco harm reduction illustrates this.Innovative reduced-risk...

Minimum unit pricing (MUP) sets a floor price on a unit of alcohol to prevent the sale of ‘cheap’ drinks, with the aim of reducing alcohol related harm. MUP was introduced in Scotland on 1 May 2018 at 50p per unit. This study estimates the financial cost to consumers in the four years since...

It's time for a radical overhaul of state-funded charitiesNew research, released today, reveals the true extent of government funded lobbying by charities and pressure groups.This report argues that, when government funds the lobbying of itself, it is subverting democracy and debasing the...

A new IEA publication explores the case for deregulating the gambling marketExecutive summary:The 2005 Gambling Act was intended to modernise gambling in the United Kingdom by replacing the anachronistic 1968 Gaming Act with legislation better suited to the twenty-first century. The 1968 Act had...

IEA discussion paper shows the Treasury is losing as much as £1.2 billion every year to the illegal alcohol industry.Executive summary:One in ten bottles or cans of beer sold in the UK have not had duty paid on them and there are growing reports of counterfeit spirits being sold by licit and...

European Commission spending millions on pro-EU lobby groupsExecutive summary:With public confidence in the European project waning, the idea of initiating a ‘civil dialogue’ with the public emerged in the mid-1990s as a way of bolstering the EU’s democratic legitimacy.Citizens have not...

This paper argues that the academic literature on the political strategies of 'unhealthy commodity industries' offers no insights into political science because the tactics identified are not specific to those industries. Without a control group of benign or healthy industries to compare them...

The benefits of innovation are unpredictable and hard to quantify. Fear of adverse consequences can lead to excessive emphasis on risk avoidance, leading to regulation that holds back beneficial innovation. The experience in tobacco harm reduction illustrates this.Innovative reduced-risk...

One in ten bottles or cans of beer sold in the UK have not had duty paid on them and there are growing reports of counterfeit spirits being sold by licit and illicit retailers. HMRC seized almost ten million litres of non-duty paid alcohol in 2010/11, a rise of 30 per cent in two years. The UK...