The British love their vanilla from Madasgascar - it has a distinctive smooth texture and taste that we seem to particularly enjoy. However, changes in conditions of supply are causing a rise in...
Water Fountains in Schools - More Powerful than a Sugar Tax?
Could the provision of powerful water fountains in schools and colleges be a more effective and fairer nudge to encourage students to drink more water and avoid sugary products? Evidence in this...
Retail banking is an industry where established companies have hefty market dominance and new entrants such as Virgin Money, Metro Bank and others have barely made a dent thus far. But the UK is...
Macroeconomic Profile for China
This blog provides a download link to a 3 slide powerpoint economic profile for the Chinese economy
Copying Behaviour - Stay at Home Millennials
Standard textbook economic analysis tends to assume that the choices people make in the daily lives are not particularly strongly influenced by the preferences and decisions of others. But we know...
Battle for Market Share in Cloud Platform Services
It would be easy to assume that the internet behemoth Google would stand head and shoulders above others in providing cloud platform services. In fact Amazon Web Services is - for the moment - well...
Lord Mervyn King on The End of Alchemy
In this talk at Google HQ in London, the former governor of the Bank of England discusses the differences between engineering and economics and much else besides!
4 Things You Need to Know about Peru
Peru has an enviable macroeconomic record, indeed it is one of the best performers in Latin America. The IMF’s top economist on Peru, Ana Corbacho, explains what sets it apart.
Social Safety Nets to Support Growth and Development
10 per cent of the world's population live in countries that are not covered by social safety net systems and only one third of the poor in the world are covered. Social safety nets in the form of...
Gross National Happiness - Images from Bhutan
This picture book from the Guardian looks at life in Bhutan. The country uses its own Gross National Happiness Index published each year.
If you enjoy your economic history then this 40 minute talk by the eminent Professor Nick Crafts will float your boat! Speaking at the 2016 Warwick Economics Summit, he discusses some of the policy...
The Modern Kuznets Curve - A Second Wave of Inequality
Inequality between countries has decline over the long run but has increased within them in a large number of cases. In a new book Branko Milanovic explores some of the long-term dynamics of income...
Fiscal Policy Revision: Focus on UK Government Debt
The government issues debt to help finance a fiscal (budget) deficit. The budget deficit is the annual amount the government has to borrow to meet the shortfall between current receipts (tax) and...
A-Z of Economists Useful for Impressing in your A2 Economics
I've inevitably had to leave some economists out of this listing but I hope this resource proves useful. Just type their name into Google to search for more on the work.
Will the new National Living Wage cost jobs?
In July 2015, the Chancellor George Osborne announced that a new National Living Wage (NLW) would replace the National Minimum Wage (NMW) for those aged 25 and over starting from 1 April 2016. The...
Powa: The Sorry Tale of a British Unicorn
In business, investors are continually looking for the next big idea and in the case of Powa (a British tech start-up), they offered a new way of paying for products through the use of their...
Nokia and the Multiplier Effect
A good piece for students studying the multiplier effect and who wish to look at the way businesses respond to the competitive environment. We read how Nokia succeeded against Motorola, but...
Fiscal Policy Update: UK Government Spending 2015-16
Here are two useful charts summarising the breakdown of UK government spending for the 2015-16 fiscal year and the change in public expenditure since 2010.
China's housing market headache
China’s housing market has been making the news lately and
this article in The Economist makes for some
interesting reading. There are a number of issues with the Chinese housing market and huge...
More universities generates faster growth
University expansion pays off, according to research by Anna Valero and John Van Reenen presented at the 2016 Royal Economic Society's annual conference. On average, a doubling the number of...