The recent growth in research access to confidential government microdata has prompted the development of more general 'output-based statistical disclosure control' (OSDC) methods which go beyond tabular protection. Central to OSDC is the concept of 'safe/unsafe statistics', allowing researchers...

There is a popular impression that governments are resistant to change and innovation, and that this is due to a combination of overly bureaucratic processes and a culture of risk aversion. It is debatable that this is well-founded, theoretically or empirically: government bodies differ from...

There is a growing body of literature which suggests that voting patterns are not independent from space yet few empirical investigations exist which take explicit account of space. This article examines the determinants of voting patterns across constituencies in England and Wales using spatial...

This paper investigates the relationships between basic needs and economic growth where the interactions between output, health, nutrition and education are explicitly simultaneous. We find a unidirectional relationship that improving basic welfare contributes strongly to labour productivity...

This paper presents a “broken stick” method to test for structural breaks in a regression model. The method is illustrated using output data across the EU and the results are bootstrapped to identify statistical significance.

Abstract: Papers examining a developed nation’s labour productivity frequently ignore spatial effects. We present empirical results indicating that geographical proximity matters for plant-level productivity.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the issue of congestion in British universities. The focus of the paper is on 41 former polytechnics that became universities in 1992, and the analysis covers the period 1995/6 to 2003/4. These new universities differ from the older...

This paper re-examines a problem of congested inputs in the Chinese automobile and textile industries, which was identified by Cooper et al. (Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 35 (2001) 227-242). These authors employed a single approach to measuring congestion, however, so it is of interest to...

The shape of the relationship between the rate of environmental degradation and income per capita has been the subject of much empirical examination. When test results based around this so-called ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ are compared, the empirical evidence is neither consistently...

This paper proposes to test the relationship between military expenditure and economic growth by including the impact of the share of military and civilian components of government expenditure in an economic growth model with endogenous technology. In this framework, we empirically consider the...