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The article explores how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the legal transition and foreign relations of Great Britain following Brexit or the British withdrawal from the European Union (EU). Topics discussed include the representation of Great Britain in EU institutions during the transition period, the reported economic and social impact of the pandemic on Great Britain, and the ratification of the trade and cooperation agreement between the EU and Great Britain.

The article explores the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on social security, workplace safety, and employment in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the duty of employers to ensure the safety of workers under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the compliance of workplaces to the lockdown protocols introduced by the British government in response to the pandemic, and the furlough of employees between March and October 2020.

The article explores the policies implemented by the British government for the benefit of companies in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Topics discussed include the introduction of the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 to prevent placement of concerned firms into insolvency, the job retention assistance extended for both employers and employees, and the investment of the government in private companies to support continued innovation.

The outcome of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership took many by surprise and has continued to define the political discourse in Britain. Despite there being a growing body of research focused on explaining how voters cast their ballot, we still know little about what motivated our politicians to do the same. In this article, we draw on individual-level survey data from the British Representation Study to explore support for Brexit among parliamentary candidates who stood at the 2017 general election. We find that candidates' political views on immigration and democracy were key determinants of their decision to vote Leave. In addition, more optimistic views of how Brexit was expected to impact British economy and democracy are associated with greater likelihood of voting Leave. These findings highlight that, while politicians were less likely than voters to support Brexit overall, their motivations for doing so were quite similar. Interestingly, however, we also find that candidates contesting constituencies with higher Leave support were no more likely to vote for Brexit themselves. Taken together, these findings have important implications for elite representation of voters' policy preferences on the issue of Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the creative economies of the US and the UK regions and nations using high-quality administrative microdata spanning the period 2011–13. The creative industries are highly urbanized in both countries. However, important differences are found in the size, density and diversity of creative activity between the two countries, which reflect differences in both urban systems and industrial organization. By testing the 'Creative Trident' approach in a comparative international context, the analysis adds to the literature on definition and classification of creative economies, as well as to discussions of regional economic development through the creative economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the political dimension of volunteering in the context of austerity. It explores how the economic recession and the austerity measures taken by governments in the UK in recent years affect how volunteers define their engagement and whether they relate it to more political forms of collective action such as protest. The article analyses the narratives and life trajectories of volunteers active in five charities in the field of poverty alleviation in Leicester. It shows how the context of growing inequalities and austerity leads these actors to construct hybrid – 'in-between' – forms of engagement in which compassionate action is mixed with social and critical resilience based on collective empowerment processes. Furthermore, it shows that participants' narratives about their own engagement are also ambivalent: they are based on a criticism of the disempowering consequences of austerity, but they sometimes tend to reproduce dominant discourses that blame the poor for their suffering. It argues that these ambivalences are inherent to narratives based on empowerment processes. The article concludes by suggesting how the focus on these 'in-between' forms of engagement – and their ambivalences – can reveal some of the changing features of collective action in contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK has had a long-standing regional house price gap with prices in London much higher than the rest of the UK. Using price data from 1969 to 2016 we track price differentials through several cycles of boom and bust, and note the growing divergence of London, particularly central London, from the rest of Britain. In explaining this divergence, we highlight the growing importance of international investment since the global financial crisis. We conclude that, although 'Brexit' may have brought the latest long London boom to a close, there is nothing to suggest that the regional house price gap will close. Given the ongoing importance of global financial inflows to major world cities, this has significant implications for how governments approach affordability and housing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the collective, member-based employers' associations in the UK that regulate the employment relationship by participating in collective bargaining. The main empirical contribution is to provide, for the first time, a longitudinal dataset of employers' associations in the UK. We use archival data from the UK Government's Certification Office to build a new dataset, identifying a decline of 81% in the number of employers' associations between 1976 and 2013–2014. We also find that political agency and reducing levels of collective bargaining undermined employers' associations by reducing employers' incentives to associate, although changes within the UK's system of employment relations enabled other types of collective employer organisation to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper differs from previous research by examining the existence of structural breaks in the UK regional house prices as well as in the prices of the different property types (flats, terraced, detached and semi-detached houses) in the UK as a whole, motivated by the uncertainty in the UK housing market and various financial events that may lead to structural changes within the housing market. Our paper enhances the conventional unit root tests by allowing for structural breaks, while including structural break tests strengthens our analysis. Our empirical results support the existence of structural breaks in the mean equation in seven out of thirteen regions of the UK as well as in three out of four property types, and in the variance equation in six regions and three property types. In addition, using a multivariate GARCH approach we examine both the behaviour of variances and covariances of the house price returns over time. Our results have significant implications for appropriate economic policy selection and investment management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some sizeable, favourable, forecast revisions from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) allowed the Chancellor to announce a significant loosening of the fiscal stance in October's Budget, while still maintaining the same margin for error against his fiscal mandate. However, forthcoming changes in the treatment of student loans in the public finances mean that the prospects of a further loosening in the fiscal stance look slim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

▀ There has been widespread misinformation in and outside Parliament about the economic case for Brexit. Outside Parliament, the rival groups – those with a negative assessment of Brexit and those with a positive one – have set out their arguments but these have huge differences in the factual and intellectual support they each bring to the debate. The group predicting a negative effect have published a wide set of empirical appraisals from academic and related research teams of the case for leaving and that against it. This, largely rigorous statistical analysis, finds strong and clear evidence of the large costs to leaving. The camp predicting a positive result for Brexit, in contrast, relies on one academic source for its case; the Cardiff University Macroeconomic Institute led by Patrick Minford. This has reported its predictions of the effects of Brexit which in contrast to the other camp, show large positive effects to growth and other key parts of the UK economy.▀ We assess the empirical quality of these two cases and conclude that the economic modelling of the Cardiff group is insufficient for them to give an adequate empirical estimate of the costs and benefits of Brexit; the Liverpool model it uses has a sparse overseas sector and does not differentiate between EU and non‐EU trade for example, so is unsuited to analyse the effects of changes in these. Our verdict is that, based on the evidence, Brexit in almost any form would be damaging to the UK.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the internal mechanisms that allow organisations to become high value manufacturing (HVM). Using a qualitative methodology, three UK manufacturing companies formed in-depth case studies with semi-structured interviews, observations and historical data. The HVM value matrix of Martinez and co-workers is used to categorise each organisation's value proposition. Wider benchmarking of the three organisations was carried out against a focus group with an additional seven manufacturing organisations. Thus, data from 10 manufacturing organisations are included in this research. The cases follow the 'customer intimacy' HVM discipline. The business processes supporting these value propositions were identified. Interestingly, each organisation's desired value proposition differs from their current one. 'Technological integrators' predominantly rely on new product development (NPD) and Strategy processes, whereas 'Socialisors' rely predominantly on Strategy and Customer Relationship processes. Companies can use the findings to better understand their current HVM value proposition and, where necessary, plan their transition to a future desired HVM value proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of Brexit, or Great Britain's withdrawal from the European Union (EU), on the economic conditions of Great Britain, including on British gross domestic product (GDP). An overview of the author's use of the gravity model to analyze Brexit's effect, including in regard to borrowing, foreign direct investment (FDI) and international trade, is provided.

The focus of our analysis is on how the UK government's proposed Brexit deal is likely to affect the economy. First, we assess how trade, migration, foreign direct investment, productivity and contributions to the EU budget might change by reviewing current proposals against historical evidence. Second, we use the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) to analyse the macroeconomic effects. Our assessment is that trade with the EU, especially in services, would be more costly after Brexit. This would be likely to have adverse effects on living standards in the UK. Our central estimate is that if the government's proposed Brexit deal is implemented, then GDP in the longer term will be around 3% lower per head than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. If the UK were to stay in a customs union with the EU, or if the Irish backstop position was to be invoked, there would still be a hit to GDP per capita of 2%. These estimates represent our considered view of the economic impact of the government's proposed Brexit deal, but they are themselves uncertain as there is no historical precedent of a country leaving a major trading block such as the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart metering studies typically focus on quantifying behavior change. However, little is known about how users understand energy information and analyze and interpret feedback from energy data visualizations. To investigate this, we gave 13 participants from nine UK households an electricity power clamp meter. Prior to installing and using the device, we conducted interviews with participants to gauge their understanding of their home electricity consumption and found that participants varied considerably from limited to substantial energy literacy. Two weeks after the clamp meter had been installed, we conducted a contextual inquiry in which we asked participants to explain the web-based time series visualization of their recorded electricity data. We found that the visualization proved unfit: participants relied on memories and suggested likely routines, while widely being unable to reliably identify specific events in the data visualization. In follow-up interviews 3 months later, we found that participants’ understanding of their home electricity consumption had hardly changed. Finally, we invited participants to generate ideas how smart electricity feedback could be optimized. They named different forms of disaggregation, higher temporal resolution, and interactivity as design requirements. In summary, these results suggest that people find home energy data very difficult to understand and link to everyday actions and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing a bivariate regime switching model, this paper attempts to examine the regime-dependent effects of inflation uncertainty and output growth uncertainty on inflation and output growth. Using monthly data of the United Kingdom and the United States, we provide evidence that both nominal and real uncertainty exert regime-dependent impacts on inflation. Furthermore, in case of both the countries, inflation uncertainty has adverse impact on output growth mainly during the period of economic contraction. Also, for these two countries, it can be argued that higher real uncertainty significantly reduces output growth only in their respective low output growth regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Long‐term unemployment more than doubled during the United Kingdom's Great Recession. Only a small fraction of this persistent increase can be accounted for by the changing composition of unemployment across personal and work history characteristics. Through extending a well‐known stocks‐flows decomposition of labour market fluctuations, the cyclical behaviour of participation flows can account for over two‐thirds of the high level of long‐term unemployment following the financial crisis, especially the procyclical flow from unemployment to inactivity. The pattern of these flows and their changing composition suggest a general shift in the labour force attachment of the unemployed during the downturn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the dynamics of output connectedness of Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies using time‐varying, region‐specific, generalised connectedness measures. We find that the connectedness of APEC economies with the rest of the world is quite substantial, with the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis increasing the connectedness measures above their precrisis levels. The USA, China, and Korea are shown to be systemically important and to dominate APEC’s real activities, while outside the APEC region the roles of India and the UK are also non‐negligible. These results suggest that the majority of APEC economies are considerably open to output shocks from the dominant economies such that policymakers in APEC must be continuously conscious of headwinds originating from these sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A green industrial strategy and green quantitative easing could set us on the path towards an environmentally and socially sustainable political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political condition in Ireland following the Great Recession from 2008 to 2016. Topics include the impact of the recession to the economy in the country and in British and European economies, the main development in Irish politics since the global financial crises, and the key factors that will determine the future political stability in the area.

This article lays out both a critique of the oxymoron ‘sustainable development’, and the potential and nuances of a Post-Development agenda. We present ecological swaraj from India and Degrowth from Europe as two examples of alternatives to development. This gives a hint of the forthcoming book, provisionally titledThe Post-Development Dictionary, that is meant to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda for activists, policymakers and scholars on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to our collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. This volume could be one base in the search for alternatives to United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in an attempt to truly transform the world. In fact, it is an agenda towards the pluriverse: ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatista say. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]