The Adam Smith Institute envisages a two-stage sale of British Rail: the track and terminals privatized as a complete unit, and then the individual services which run on the track..
Read the full paper here.
The Adam Smith Institute’s latest policy briefing, written by Maxwell Marlow and Sofia Risino, suggests various childcare reforms aimed at cutting costs, boosting quality and increasing parental choice.
The Adam Smith Institute envisages a two-stage sale of British Rail: the track and terminals privatized as a complete unit, and then the individual services which run on the track..
Read the full paper here.
In his 1987 report 'A Divorce for Auntie', Nicholas O'Shaughnessy of Loughborough University presents objections to the "monolithic" ideological nature of the BBC. Today, the debate on the BBC's ideological leanings continues, with 41% of those polled in 2013 saying they believed it to display some bias. This considered, O'Shaughnessy's report remains important to this ongoing controversy.
This paper provides an overview of the expansion of higher education in the UK, how it happened, the implication for public funding and the implications with regards to businesses.
How to develop the rural landscape whilst still protecting the environment? This was the question that was answered at an ASI Seminar in 1987, including speakers such as Brian Waters, Boisot Waters Cohen Partnership, Professor Alan Evans of The University of Reading and John Ardill of The Guardian, amongst others. The report sets out regulatory ideas that would allow for development on the green belt, and an easing of the planning laws to allow new building to take place.
Land is our greatest asset. It is the most fundamental generator of wealth for it's necessary to all forms of economic activity. Furthermore, it increases in value with any improvement, urbanisation, population increases or local infrastructure provision. Green gold indeed!
Read the full paper here.
This album catalogues the media coverage of the Adam Smith Institute in it’s early years.
Find the full album here.
Britain has not done much to assist third world development after its former colonies received independence. Their elites were educated in the universities and colleges of Britain, and were taught ill-conceived and ultimately unsuccessful collectivist ideas. The example which Britain and other European countries provided was that centralisation was good, that government should solve problems, and that industry should be nationalised. it was entirely the wrong example for their countries to follow.
This paper argues that Britain would be well advised to participate wholeheartedly in these developments, adapting her defence policy to the new circumstances, rather than being stranded with old weapons and old ideas. As the following chapter demonstrates, most of the charges that are levelled against strategic defence are false, misinformed, or misguided. Subsequent sections detail the substantial Soviet effort to develop strategic defences, the rapid technological progress that is being made in the US SDI research programme, and the political popularity of SDI. The conclusion of this paper is that strategic defence has much to offer Britain, that she has much of the technological know-how required to make it a success, and she should begin to carry out her own research in co-operation with the US with a view to deployment within the next two decades.
The inefficiency and low output of the nationalized industries in post-war Britain has been widely acknowledged, first in popular anecdote, and late in scholarly reports which compared their performance to private sector counterparts both in Britain and abroad.
Many ad hoc explanations were offered to account for this. It was first suggested that the second world war had destroyed their capital plant and equipment, making them labour under insuperable burdens of replacement. This provided a convenient explanation for their poor performance, but failed to deal with the cases for the nationalized industries laboured under the handical of not having had their capital equipment destroyed by the second world war, it was suggested that the other European countries, by being forced to replaced destroyed stock, had been able to modernize, leaving their British equivalents still using hopelessly datet equipment.
It was many years after the comparatively poor performance of the public sector had been well documented that these co-incidental explanations gave way before the understand that the public sector is inherently inferior in its ability to deliver goods and services. It is not the presence of accidental factors which accompany the public sector supply that undermine its efficiency, it is the fact of public operation itself.
Privatization has begun the systematic transfer of activity from the public to the private sector. It is already a world-wide movement, and is still accelerating. It shows every sign of making widespread and irreversible changes to the distribution between public and private sectors, and thus becoming on of the most potent economic facts of our age. It is a world event whose effect has barely begun to make itself felt.
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In 1986 the Adam Smith Institute called for the reform and liberalisation of the archaic drinking and licensing laws of England and Wales. This study by the ASI compared Scotland and England and Wales after the laws had been changed North of the border. It found that even though alcohol was more readily available there, there was a reduction in the negative aspects of drink such as disorderly behaviour and health problems.
Read it here.