Economy & Tax
Maxwell Marlow
The Price of Everything, the Social Value of ...
The Price of Everything, the Social Value of Nothing: How the Social Value Act damages British procurement
Economy & Tax
Madsen Pirie
Innovative Answers for Britain's Barriers
Innovative Answers for Britain's Barriers
Immigration
Duncan McClements and Dr Bryan Cheang
Optimising for our Openness: The Economic ...
Optimising for our Openness: The Economic Effects of Visa Auctions in the UK
Government & Politics
Tim Ambler
‘Shrinking Whitehall’: Radically modernising a ...
‘Shrinking Whitehall’: Radically modernising a cumbersome state
Welfare
Max Marlow
Leave Them Kids Alone: The Next Steps on ...

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.

Leave Them Kids Alone: The Next Steps on Childcare Reform

Plain packaging

Commercial expression, anti-smoking extremism and the risks of hyper-regulation.

Christopher Snowdon examines the case for plain packaging of cigarettes, including examples from around the world. He finds that its supposed benefits are, in fact, nonexistant, and plain packaging laws may have significant unintended consequences as well, including making counterfeiting of cigarettes more common. Plain packaging laws could lead us down a slippery slope where alcohol and even fatty foods are also controlled by the government.

Read this report.

Patterns of sustainable specialization and trade

Adam Smith and David Ricardo explained the benefits of trade, based on specialisation and comparative advantage. These concepts, says Arnold Kling, also can provide the basis for explaining fluctuations in employment. In this paper Kling proposes that we jettison the Keynesian paradigm of aggregate supply and demand (AS-AD) in favour of an alternative paradigm, which he calls patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade (PSST).

Read this report.

The law of opposites: Illusory profits in the financial sector

Accurate accounting is at the root of the legal and scrutiny framework; without accurate accounts basic laws are incapable of enforcement. This report argues that international accounting rules have given the impression of illusory profits on bank balance sheets, inflating bonuses and creating perverse incentives for banks to act recklessly.

Read this report.

Reforming the National Health Service

In this report, retired industrial line manager and entrepreneur Chris Davies reflects on his experience of four decades of NHS care, and details the numerous occasions on which Britain's health service has failed him. He argues that the NHS is a fifties-style nationalized service that does “time wasting and inconvenience on a monumental scale" and is fundamentally incapable of serving its customers effectively. Davies goes on to advocate reforms far more radical than anything yet contemplated by the British government: his blueprint would see the entire NHS estate sold to competing, private groups; it would establish a national insurance fund financed by the proceeds of those sales and by employer and employee contributions; and it would introduce a co-payments system whereby patients had to pay 20 percent of medical bills themselves, up to reasonable annual limit.

Read this report.

 

Bank regulation: Can we trust the Vickers Report?

In this response to the Vickers report, financial experts Tim Ambler and Miles Saltiel argue that the report's findings fail to address the root causes of the financial crisis and would create another layer of bureaucracy. Instead, the government should allow the creation of new "Trust Banks" that would be safely run, reduce arguments for protection of riskier banks, and introduce new competition to the high street.

Read this report.

,

Hanging London out to dry: The impact of an EU Financial Transaction Tax

,

In a follow up his last report on the Tobin Tax, Adam Baldwin assesses the impact of the European Commission's Financial Transaction Tax on Britain. He draws on the EC's impact assessment and independent research and concludes that it would wipe out derivatives trading in the City, hurt economic growth and increase market volatility.

Read this report.