New workstream from the IEA coming soon.

Many readers will be familiar with the concept of the Bootleggers and Baptists, in which self-interested businesses find common cause with moral busybodies in rigging the market against consumers. The ...

The Spring Statement was more-or-less as expected. A worsening economic outlook meant that the Chancellor’s headroom against her primary fiscal rule – a current budget surplus in five years’ time – ...

The only plausible explanation for the collapse in legal tobacco sales is that there has been rapid growth in tobacco sales on the black market. There were four significant increases in tobacco duty ...

Summary The Freeports strategy announced by the previous government attempted to address today’s challenges with yesterday’s recipes, lacked the necessary deregulatory framework and failed to address ...

Summary Given the high economic costs of fraud, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 aims to address the well-known deficiencies of the common law’s approach to corporate criminal ...

The Government’s own impact assessment for its employment rights legislation estimates that the measures could cost businesses up to £5 billion annually. To start, this is a substantial amount. Past ...

UK prices are at the IEA median of 10.17p/kWh, slightly above those in France and a bit below those in Germany. The price differential compared to the US is less pronounced, but domestic gas prices in ...

About the Author Dr Kristian Niemietz is the IEA’s Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy. He is the author of the books A New Understanding of Poverty (2011), Redefining the Poverty Debate ...

The overview highlights the academic consensus on harmful consequences. Most studies (56 out of 65) find that rent controls succeed in lowering rents for controlled units, as intended. However, 14 out ...

Discussion and conclusion The manifestos contain hundreds of new regulatory proposals touching on various policy areas, from the environment and workplace rights to utility regulation, race relations ...

Private schools are, on the whole, a good thing. They give parents greater choice in their children’s education, provide the state sector much needed competition and attract money from abroad by ...