The New Deal for Young People (NDYP) is one of the main components of the UK government's Welfare-to-Work strategy aimed at raising employment and reducing benefit dependency. It combines elements of an active labour market programme with a stricter benefit regime. This paper evaluates its...

Britain's public sector deficit in the 1990s has been much too large to allow the public sector to maintain its balance sheet position. In order to do this the current account deficit has to be reduced from its 1995/6 figure of 3_ per cent of GDP to close to zero. Government plans show this...

A wide range of different models can be used to analyse the behaviour of the economy over the cycle. While various diagnostic tools are available to discriminate between them, these are rarely conclusive. Consequently poor models survive alongside good ones. This paper develops the use of...

Welfare-to-work programmes were implemented in several OECD countries during the 1990s. With these programmes, entitlement to unemployment related benefits is conditional on taking up help in finding and actively preparing for work. This paper examines empirically the employment effects of the...

Does the social rate of return to physical investment exceed the private rate to an economically significant extent? In particular, is the return to investment in plant and machinery very high? This question is addressed by estimating a number of different models employing cross-section, time...

Opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers in the UK diverged over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We develop an empirical framework consistent with these trends that highlights the importance of skill heterogeneity in both wage setting and labour demand in explaining aggregate...