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This article examines the prominent role of Manchester in recent devolution debates. The so-called "Manchester Model" for city-regional governance has been based on developing a tradition of close collaboration amongst neighbouring local authorities, allied to a highly strategic approach to building alliances, the development of a strong if selective evidence base and an intellectual agenda inspired by agglomeration economics. Drawing on 35 interviews with key actors in Manchester and surrounding areas we reveal how the Manchester Model has been carefully nurtured over a long period, drawing on agglomeration economics to argue that Manchester should be seen as England's second city. This article critically examines this process of case-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The initial global market reaction to the UK Brexit vote was very negative and in our view overdone. Nevertheless, we expect the uncertainty to linger for a while, with the vote having refocused investors on existing vulnerabilities in the world economy. Our new forecasts see the main negative impacts on growth being in the UK, the Eurozone and Japan. Risks to our new forecasts remain skewed to the downside, with a significant danger of world growth dropping below 2% this year., Our new forecasts see UK growth dropping to 1.4% a year in 2017-18, down from 2.2-2.3% a year before. In the Eurozone, growth will be around 0.2% a year weaker in 2017-18 and Japan is also a loser as a result of the risk aversion-driven stronger yen, with growth at just 0.3% in 2017 from 0.5%., The size of the initial global market sell-off makes no sense in the context of the likely impact from a weaker UK. In part, it seems to have reflected the pricing in of very negative scenarios in the Eurozone. But investors may also be worrying about other global problems glossed over in recent months., One risk to our forecast is that confidence effects on businesses and consumers are larger than we expect - but such effects are often overstated. Another danger is that more of the recent financial market weakness will 'stick' than our new baseline forecasts assume., Our world recession indicator is already at elevated levels and suggests a significant danger of world growth slipping below 2% this year; not a recession, but it might feel like one. Global policymakers need to act quickly to head off the risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent months have seen the Government's endeavours to cut public sector borrowing stall. The UK's vote to leave the EU will now throw previous fiscal plans up in the air via both a likely slowdown in the economy and the possibility of a discretionary fiscal loosening. But the latter could prove a silver lining for the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the UK Brexit vote, forecasters have rushed to downgrade their growth forecasts for the UK, with some now expecting a recession. Using the Oxford Economics' Global Economic Model, we examine how likely a recession is by looking at the shocks the UK economy faces and the policy responses. We conclude that while a sharp slowdown is likely - in line with our own new forecasts - a recession is unlikely., Many UK forecasters are now predicting a recession in 2017, even though 'stand-alone' recessions in industrial countries are rare. Our forecast is less downbeat. The UK faces a series of negative shocks including to consumers and business confidence, but growth will be supported by the weaker sterling and likely policy responses., Using the Oxford Economics' Global Economic Model, we show that to shift our baseline forecast of growth of 1.1% next year to zero would require a very severe negative confidence shock. Our new baseline already assumes a shock equivalent to one-third of that seen in the global financial crisis (GFC). All else being equal, the shock would have to be around two-thirds of that in the GFC to cut GDP growth to zero in 2017., Our new baseline also does not incorporate all the possible policy levers the UK can employ. We currently assume the Bank Rate drops to zero, but if a 'rescue package' of £75 billion of QE and a fiscal stimulus equal to 1% of GDP was also added, then the shock to confidence needed to get zero GDP growth would have to be similar to that seen in the GFC. We do not consider this likely given the scale of financial stress and credit restriction that occurred globally at the time of the GFC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK exit from the EU represents a qualitative change in the nature of EU membership. On the one hand, it conveyed the lesson that for the Union to be sustainable, membership needs to entail constant caretaking as far as individual members' contributions to the common good are concerned, with both rights and obligations. Countries with preferences that are too divergent for the Union to function properly should then not be discouraged to invoke Article 50 and to opt instead for membership in the EEA or for a free trade agreement. The Union has to deliver to be sustainable, but it cannot do so if there is a constant hold up of decisions that are in the common interest. On the other hand, with the eurozone having established itself as the de facto core of European (political) integration, the UK's preference for a stand-alone (and incomplete) economic union became untenable, because the need to make the monetary union work calls for further integration and institution-building in the economic union sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-claims and invigorates the debate on ‘New Materialism’ as it is unfolding within Marxist political economy specifically. We choose this site to make our intervention in the debate because, while Marxism claims to makes visible the poor, dispossessed and those ‘left behind’ in the contemporary global capitalist economy, we discern, in contributions made thus far, a marked tendency to sideline the rich tradition of feminist historical materialist scholarship. We contend that feminist analyses are vital in elucidating the ‘gendered face’ of global financial crisis and austerity. Accordingly, after first mapping the contours of current discussion, we briefly revisit feminist critiques of Marxism; interrogate the inter-relationship between neoliberal capitalism, the gendered nature of labour markets, the ‘patriarchal’ state and social reproduction and unpaid care work; and, finally, we further develop our argument through an analysis of the gendered impacts of current austerity measures in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong's greater economic integration with China has continued to underpin its service-oriented economy following the manufacturing sectors' hollowing out since the 1990s. Hong Kong is an important transit hub for China's external trade, especially for the Pearl River Delta Region. China's deregulation of mainland visitors to Hong Kong under the Individual Visit Scheme since 2003 has contributed to Hong Kong's bulging trade surplus in travel. Nonetheless, the tremendous business opportunities from China's financial reform won't unseat the US and the UK as Hong Kong's top trade partners in financial services. Overall, Hong Kong's service economy will continue to prosper in the near term with China's continuous granting of special treatment. In the long run, strengthening Hong Kong's bridging role between mainland China and the global market will be crucial for the viability of its services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between per capita emissions ( $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ and $$\hbox {SO}_{2}$$ ) and economic growth (per capita GDP) in the UK using a long span of data. This paper examines the existence of a non-linear relationship between emissions and economic growth using methods that do not restrict the relationship to be any particular shape. The methodology employs instrumental variables in the place of per capita GDP to deal with potential concerns about errors in variables and endogeneity. The empirical results provide strong support for the environmental Kuznets curve, with estimated turning points in 1966 and 1967 for $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ and $$\hbox {SO}_{2}$$ , respectively. These turning points correspond roughly with the introduction of the Clean Air Act in the UK as well as the reduction in the use of coal as an energy source; and together, they provide a snapshot of the forces driving the turning points. The paper continues by further investigating the temporal behavior of the inverted U-shaped relationship. The findings indicate that if emissions and per capita GDP deviate from their long-run relationship, emissions do the 'heavy lifting' to restore the system to equilibrium. This result is intuitively pleasing because mitigation is directly affected by legislation as opposed to declining economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reform of the eurozone and the concerns surrounding a potential 'Brexit' has given rise to a new debate about differentiation but also disintegration in the European Union. This article provides a theoretical and analytical approach to understanding how differentiation is related to the debate on distribution of competences across various levels government. It finds that differentiation has played an important role in the EU integration process since the 1950s, even though the risk of fragmentation has always existed. Facing the benefits and costs of differentiation, the member states have developed their own practices. Three ideosyncratic groups of member states can be identified in this regard: first, a group of Anglo-Scandinavian member states which refuse centralization of the EU; a Franco-German group which considers the integration through the promotion of a 'core Europe'; and, third, a group of central and east European member states who fear that differentiation would set their interests aside and relegate them to second-class status within the EU. Finally, Brexit is not only about the status of the UK in the EU, but casts deeper questions on how to clarify the nature of relations between the eurozone and the EU as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is generally known that sports journalism is an area of gender disparity, no major academic study has established the proportion of women sports writers in the UK press. Although female sports broadcasters have increased their visibility in the United Kingdom, the same is not true in the print media. This research first examines the current visibility of women sports journalists in the national UK press, by counting by-lines according to gender. Second, a study explores if the 2012 London Olympic Games had any effect on the proportion of female sports writers in the UK press, by comparing sports by-lines in a sample 6 months before and after the games. Furthermore, these results are compared to a decade earlier to see if the situation has improved. The findings indicate that the proportion of female sports writers in the UK press is lower than in comparable countries, with little improvement over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficit reduction continues to be a slow process. And while the Government officially remains on course to meet its objective of a budget surplus by the end of the decade, it will not take much to knock that target off course, including an acceptance of the implausibility of current plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Net inward migration from the EU has been running at record levels in recent years, although the steep increase in new National Insurance numbers issued suggests that the official data may be understating the level of immigration. There was a clear step up in inflows after both expansions of the EU into central and eastern Europe, while the relative strength of the UK labour market has been an important driver of the more recent rise in inflows., High levels of immigration have helped to offset the impact of an ageing population and ensured that the UK has enjoyed stronger labour supply growth than many of its peers. With migrants typically being better educated than their UK-born counterparts, the quality of the stock of labour has also improved, and migrants have been found to have a net positive fiscal impact., But there have been some downsides, with evidence that high immigration has had a small dampening impact on wages. That migrants tend to head to London and the other southern regions over other destinations has exacerbated the imbalances in regional housing markets., Given that a desire to have greater control over immigration is usually one of the key motivations for those favouring Brexit, a vote in favour of leaving the EU is likely to see the UK abandon the policy of free movement of labour. This would probably see the UK extend the points-based system that it currently uses for non-EU countries to include EU migrants., Our modelling suggests that the adoption of a 'populist' immigration policy which lowers net inward migration by 60,000 a year could reduce the level of GDP by 1.1% in 2030 compared with our baseline forecast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scenario run on the Oxford Global Model suggests that Brexit would leave the level of UK GDP 1.3ppt lower by Q2 2018 compared with our baseline forecast that the UK votes to stay in the EU. A vote to leave would mainly shock business confidence but consumers would be adversely affected too. Exporters in price-sensitive sectors would benefit from a weaker exchange rate., Market pricing suggests that sterling could initially fall by around 15% before recovering some of its losses, while the heightened uncertainty would also be expected to drive a sharp drop in equity prices in H2 2016., Brexit would present something of a dilemma for policymakers. While a weaker pound would cause inflation to initially spike upwards, we would expect the MPC to look through this and cut Bank Rate in order to support activity. And with the UK likely to retain its reputation as a safe haven, this would also see gilt yields stay lower for longer., Weaker growth would also put the Chancellor in breach of the fiscal mandate, though we would expect him to plead extenuating circumstances, rather than tighten policy and potentially exacerbate the slowdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential for a departure from the EU to undermine the UK's attractiveness as a location for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is often cited as one of the key risks were the UK to leave the EU. In weighing up the threat to FDI posed by 'Brexit' we assess the net gain from inward investment and the role played by EU membership in attracting FDI., In theory, FDI benefits the economy via lower interest rates, higher wages for workers and 'spillover' benefits boosting economy-wide productivity. But the evidence for these benefits is ambiguous. And FDI has potential drawbacks. These include an adverse effect on the tradeable sector, reflected in a wider current account deficit, the potential to 'crowd out' investment by domestic firms and the fiscal cost of subsidies paid to inward investors., That almost half of FDI in the UK comes from other EU countries suggests that EU membership is not the only driver of foreign investment in the UK. Other factors include the UK's business friendly environment, as reflected in global competitiveness surveys, and a relatively deregulated labour market. Of perhaps most importance is the lure provided by the UK's large domestic economy. 80% of FDI in the UK is in sectors where sales to the EU account for less than 10% of total demand., However, FDI in manufacturing does look vulnerable to Brexit, given the importance of the EU market. Granted, manufacturing accounts for a modest share of UK FDI. But to the extent that FDI boosts productivity, a loss of inward investment in this sector is likely to come at a disproportionate cost., Our modelling suggests that in a worst case Brexit scenario, the stock of FDI could ultimately be 7% lower relative to the UK remaining in the EU, potentially knocking around ½% off the level of GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a major market for UK exports, the EU is not quite as significant as the headline statistics suggest and one which is likely to continue declining in relative importance. The static tariff cost of a worst-case 'Brexit' is estimated to be around ¼% of GDP, a modest sum., But the dynamic cost could be higher. And certain industrial sectors look vulnerable, notably aircraft and chemicals where sales to the EU account for over 40% of total (domestic and overseas) demand and EU tariffs are relatively high., Moreover, exports to the EU would also face non-tariff barriers, which would be of particular relevance for the services sector. That services firms export much more to the rest of the world than to the EU suggests that they are well versed in overcoming such barriers. But financial services would face particular risks from Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the Great Recession, UK households reduced real food expenditure. We show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour. We document the mechanisms that households used. We motivate our analysis with a model of shopping behaviour in which households adjust shopping effort and the characteristics of their shopping basket in response to economic shocks. We use detailed longitudinal data and focus on within-household changes in basket characteristics and proxies for shopping effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Global Financial Crisis placed the utility of financial services in question. The crash, great recession, wealth transfers from public to private, austerity and growing inequality cast doubt on the idea that finance is a boon to the host economy. This article systematizes these doubts to highlight the perils of an oversized financial sector. States failing to harness natural resources for development led to the concept of the Resource Curse. In many countries, resource dependence generated slower growth, crowding out, reduced economic diversity, lost entrepreneurialism, unemployment, economic instability, inequality, conflict, rent-seeking and corruption. The Finance Curse produces similar effects, often for similar reasons. Beyond a point, a growing financial sector can do more harm than good. Unlike the Resource Curse, these harms transcend borders. The concept of a Finance Curse starkly illuminates the condition of Britain's political economy and the character of its relations with the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment scholars have a longstanding interest in the potential for an active industrial policy to shift the UK economy to a high-wage, high-skill trajectory. This article addresses this topic by examining policy, performance and employment in the UK pharmaceutical sector, which has historically benefited from substantial government assistance. While weaknesses are apparent, overall the industrial policy context has supported the performance of the UK sector, underpinning a sizable number of highly skilled and paid jobs. The findings demonstrate the potential of an active industrial policy to facilitate a shift to a higher skills trajectory. Wider considerations of relevance and policy recommendations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes in the UK--at Heathrow Airport and Lindsey Oil Refinery--we explore the potential for workers to intervene in such globalizing processes. We highlight both the ability of grassroots workers to mobilize their own spatial networks but also their limitations in an increasingly hostile neoliberal landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conservative party's ability to embrace popular concerns around value, place and equality has enabled it to resurrect the old pre-crisis growth model, says Craig Berry, in a move which none of the post-crisis narratives offered by the Labour party has yet been able to disrupt or overturn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the last two decades, cultural quarters have been used by many local councils across the UK as attempts to redevelop and revitalize declining urban centres. Cities have spent millions of pounds developing cultural quarter policies, justified by the prevailing rhetoric of culture revitalizing the local economy and the creation of a “cultural milieu” that stimulates creative industry activity. However, in many cases in the UK, visitor numbers remain lower than expected, and in some cases, flagship projects have been sold off or closed down. High rents force out small and freelance creative industry actors, and (non-commercial) artistic interventions are strictly policed. Forming part of the wider debate on the political circumscription of the creativity paradigm, this paper argues that cultural quarters have been viewed within a predominately economistic, dichotomous and simplistic framework. This paper argues that there is a need for a more practiced-based, subjective account of cultural quarters that goes beyond such a traditional framework to include more deleterious practices such as community impoverishment, precariousness and short-termism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the underlying mechanisms at the heart of Britain's post-crisis political economy. We argue that the contemporary economic recovery has been characterised by a dynamic of ‘regressive redistribution’: a socially regressive dynamic of state-led economic restructuring that has worked through two axes at the centre of the recovery. The first axis, a monetary policy framework centred upon Quantitative Easing, has driven asset-price inflation to the benefit of the wealthiest asset holders. The second axis centres upon the politics of regressive labour market restructuring which has provoked widespread wage deflation. In combination, these two axes have been central to defining the contours of the Britain's post-crisis political economy paradigm: characterised by rising asset wealth for the few, and falling living standards alongside increasing economic insecurity for wage earners. The opportunity to change path from the trends of deepening inequality that defined the pre-crisis era has not been taken. Instead, the prevailing policy paradigm of the post-crisis period – discursively unified and sustained by David Cameron's government – has intensified the regressively redistributive dynamics at the core of the neo-liberal project. Ultimately, this is likely to further entrench structural weaknesses in Britain's economy in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper identifies how a series of higher apprenticeships projects funded by the UK coalition government in England between 2012 and 2014 are located within structures of professional and vocational formation. Factors that relate to the structuring of formation are discussed, including how notions of professionalization and legitimacy, and the political economy of skill, impact on formation processes. Using sketches of three modes of formation, and evidence from documents associated with eight developmental and capacity building projects, higher apprenticeships are perceived as providing opportunities to vertically extend formation structures ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’, in addition to providing forms of ‘horizontal extension’ through the development of new alternative progression routes to professional qualification. Alterations and extensions to formation structures are engendered by the specific macro and meso context of the relevant sector or profession, and may be influenced by the involvement of further and higher education institutions, leading to the prioritization of particular types of progression, professional accreditation and qualification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the effect of an increase in the stock of human capital due to skilled immigration on the innovative performance of recipient economies? Combining firm-level micro-data with area-level labour force information, this paper investigates the impact of skilled international migration inflows on firms' product and process innovation in British local labour market areas. The paper supports the evidence in favour of a causal link between immigration and innovation. Results also show that the nature of the innovative process and the typology of innovative activities performed by local firms play a key role in the relation between immigration and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the transmission of daytime and overnight information in terms of returns and volatility between Chinese and Asian, European and North American main stock markets. We propose a bivariate analysis with China as benchmark. By testing the constancy of the conditional correlations, we use an extended constant or dynamic conditional correlation GARCH model. The empirical findings show that across the daytime information transmissions, the relationships between China and Asian markets are closer than China and non-Asian markets, whereas through the overnight information transmissions these relationships are inverse. The analysis provides, before the crisis, that the overnight volatility spillover effects are from China to the United States and the United Kingdom. During the crisis, China affects the United Kingdom in terms of daytime volatility spillovers, whereas in terms of overnight volatility spillovers China affects the United States and is influenced by Japan. After the crisis, daytime volatility spillovers are from Taiwan to China, whereas the overnight volatility spillover effects are from China to the United States and the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news-media has been identified as an influence on donor nations’ overseas aid allocations, acting as a site where decisions are justified to ‘domestic constituencies’ and through which resistance is mobilised. Mediated pressures on aid allocations amplified between 2008 and 2011 in three donor countries experiencing domestic economic difficulties: Ireland, the UK and the US. This study suggests that each country’s print-media positioned the macro resourcing of aid primarily as an inward concern, neglected recipient country needs, and made weak connections to international policy frameworks to benchmark, contextualise and rationalise aid allocations. The research suggests that the explanatory limitations of the countries’ news-models in communicating the processes and rationales underpinning macro aid resourcing may be a factor in sustaining a knowledge and legitimacy deficit among domestic publics for international aid agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of the past couple of months have led us to push out our call for the first UK rate hike from February 2016 to May 2016. The financial market turmoil of late summer, increasingly dovish commentary from the MPC, the enduring strength of sterling and the likelihood of lower inflation over the next six months are all factors which point to the first rate hike coming later., This is a modal forecast which is consistent with our baseline forecast playing out. But the escalating downside risks would imply a mean forecast which shows the first rate hike coming even later still and the subsequent path of monetary tightening being shallower. This explains why the expectations of financial markets may appear to be more bearish than our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consistent drop in public sector net borrowing in the first half of the year has stalled recently. And signs of a weaker pace of growth in the economy also points to borrowing in 2015-16 not falling as fast as the OBR expects. But evidence that the economy's potential is stronger than previously believed may allow an easing of the longer-term fiscal squeeze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to infrastructure projects in Great Britain as of October 2015 including the National Football League (NFL) in London, England, Help for Heroes (H4H) charities, and Volkswagen (VW) diesel engine scandal.

Knowledge of research methods is regarded as crucial for the UK economy and workforce. However, research methods teaching is viewed as a challenging area for lecturers and students. The pedagogy of research methods teaching within universities has been noted as underdeveloped, with undergraduate students regularly expressing negative dispositions to the subject. These are challenges documented in university-based higher education (HE), yet little is known of the practices and pedagogies of research methods teaching in the college-based HE setting, where the delivery of HE has grown in prominence in recent years. Because college-based HE is widely regarded as primarily vocational, incorporating research methods into curricula may be seen as an additional level of complexity for staff to negotiate. In this article, we report on the data collected within a study to examine research methods teaching in social science disciplines on HE programmes taught in college-based settings in England. Drawing on data obtained from college-based HE lecturers and students, we discuss features of research methods teaching and how these may be applied with a diverse student body, within vocationally focused institutions. Issues of institutional culture, resourcing and staff development are also considered as these are identified as integral to the successful embedding of research methods teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the UK pension system is gender blind and is structured around a heteropatriarchal experience. It does so by analysing two key pieces of UK pension policy: the New Flat Rate State Pension and Auto-Enrolment. Since the 1980s the value of the British state pension has fallen, and it is now worth half what it was in 1979. This presents a particular disadvantage for women who not only tend to be lower paid, but because of a gendered occupational life course, also tend to work part-time hours, and thus also fail to work the number of qualifying years for the full state pension. Traditionally, this results in a pension penalty for women. It is argued that the New Flat Rate State Pension and Auto-Enrolment will counteract this disadvantage, and political discourses used by policymakers claim that they will also create a fairer society. The argument presented here seeks to demonstrate that this claim is problematic by exposing how (i) gender blindness prevents gender equality in pension provision delivery, and (ii) how the formulation of these policies are actually reinforced by a heteropatriarchal welfare system, which fundamentally undermines the contribution made by women to the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]