Search

This paper considers the origins and traces the history of the Social Fund, an ideologically-motivated social policy departure of the Thatcher era. It identifies the controversy, in research communities amongst others, which surrounded the establishment of the Fund, and considers the evidence of recurring difficulties in its practical operation over a thirty-year period. It then turns to the Coalition administration in Westminster’s decision to divest itself of responsibility for key parts of the Fund, devolving such obligations to local authorities in England, the Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales. The paper sets out a comparison of the approaches being developed to discharge the Fund’s prior responsibilities in the three nations. It concludes that the essential policy thrust lies in a determination to roll back central state obligations in poverty relief and income maintenance which had hitherto been accepted by all post-war administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper undertakes a linkage analysis on a regional economy, concentrating on tourism-related sectors. Recent improvements in the accounting for tourism activity, through satellite account frameworks, provide information on tourism-related sectors and their transactions with the rest of the economy. Several regions of the UK have highlighted tourism as an important development sector, but often with a less than perfect understanding of how changes in tourism demand affect tourism-related sectors and then how changes in these sectors impact the rest of the economy. The study employs a series of approaches, to construct linkage measures and to explore the regional intensity of the transactions linkages of tourism-related sectors; it also considers the extent to which, in the case study region of Wales, these same sectors might be considered as 'key' in terms of their linkage strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are substantial variations in labour market outcomes between neighbourhoods. One potential partial explanation is that residents of some neighbourhoods face discrimination from employers. Although studies of deprived areas have recorded resident perceptions of discrimination by employers and negative employer perceptions of certain areas, until now there has been no direct evidence on whether employers treat job applicants differently by area of residence. This paper reports a unique experiment to test for a neighbourhood reputation effect involving 2001 applications to 667 real jobs by fictional candidates nominally resident in neighbourhoods with poor and bland reputations. The experiment found no statistically significant difference in employer treatment of applicants from these areas, indicating that people living in neighbourhoods with poor reputations did not face ‘postcode discrimination’ in the labour market, at the initial selection stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using exploratory spatial data analysis and house price data from local authority districts in England and Wales, this article considers whether a regional ripple effect can be tracked at the district level. Although spatial house price variation has been explored at a sub-regional level, this is possibly the first paper to attempt to track house price spillover between districts on a national basis. High- and low-growth clusters of areas are traced. It is concluded that spatial spillover of house price growth is unlikely to be based on interlocked markets bonded by commuting or migration alone; information flows and expectations are likely to reinforce interdistrict transmission. Specifically, house price spillover north of the East Midlands appears much more rapid than would be consistent with a ‘ripple’, suggesting that there is some support for undertaking British housing market analysis on a spatially segmented basis, even at a regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]