Since 1990, following Lord Cullen's public inquiry into the Piper-Alpha disaster, the oil industry has spent approximately 2.6 billion pounds on safety improvements. The operators have co-operated with governmental authorities in the design of a new regulatory regime, based on the principles of...

The BSE crisis represents one of the worst policy disasters experienced by a UK government in recent years. In material terms, it led to the slaughter of 3.3 million cattle and an estimated economic loss of £3.7 billion. In administrative terms, the crisis led to the dissolution of the Ministry...

The policy of key international organisation continues to be informed by the assumption that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has an unambiguously positive effect on recipient nations. However, there is increasing evidence that, on a global scale, increased trade and investment flows from rich to...

The refinancing of PFI (Private Finance Initiative) projects currently represents one of the most contentious aspects of Public Private Partnership in the UK. The negative publicity associated with UK PFI refinancing deals is associated with two main factors, namely evidence of massive private...

This article traces the evolution and demise of the postwar model of job quality. This model evolved in the context of theories of sheltered employment. It tied assumptions about job quality to the idea that the economy was separable into a stable and unstable segment. Jobs were typically...

During the past decade, major governance breakdowns in public limited companies have brought issues of corporate governance to the forefront of debate. As a result, a series of governance codes have been introduced into the UK that have sought to obligate publicly listed companies to certain...

This paper analyzes competing models of dismissal regulation from a Law and Economics perspective, using the contemporary US and UK dismissal regimes as a comparative benchmark. The regulation of dismissals in the UK and US differs widely in spite of their joint common-law tradition. Whereas the...

Purpose – The National Health Service (NHS) Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) programme was launched in 2001 as an innovative public‐private partnership to address the historical under‐investment in local primary care facilities in England. The organisations from the public and...