The ‘Singapore scenario’: the uncertain prospects for labour standards in post‐Brexit Britain

The Conservative government of Theresa May asserted that labour standards would be preserved post‐Brexit. The Labour Party also privileged labour standards in its anti‐austerity programme. The threat remains however that Brexit will provide an incentive to erode labour standards in a global ‘race to the bottom’ in a ‘Singapore scenario’.     

Local Government Management

In the United Kingdom (UK), the Labour Government is seeking to achieve fundamental change in the way local authorities are led and managed. To this end, it has introduced political and managerial reforms, central to which is the concept of ‘best value’. This new agenda, to which local authorities must respond, builds upon the changes which resulted from the Conservative era 1979–1997. Although Labour has abolished the centrepiece of Conservative policy towards local government, i.e. compulsory competitive tendering (CCT), Labour shares the belief of successive Conservative governments that local authorities must radically improve the way services are delivered. This article considers the nature of the changed local government environment in the UK, including the role, policy and service provision debates which have occurred in local government. It provides a conceptual framework within which to consider the degree of change which has occurred in local authority management. A typology of responses to change and a model by which past and future change may be gauged are suggested.     

In from the cold? Ben Roberts and Conservative industrial relations reform

Over the course of his career Professor Ben Roberts became an increasingly vocal critic of the trade union movement and a firm advocate of the case for legal restrictions on their activities. The growing influence of neoliberal ideas inside the Conservative Party, driven by think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, could have provided him with the opportunity to exert some influence over industrial relations policymaking, after years of political isolation. In fact Ben Roberts remained on the margins of the policy networks that constructed the Thatcherite programme of industrial relations reform. His labour movement background and lack of involvement in think tank seminars and activities made it difficult for him to penetrate the tight and cohesive networks that were integral to Conservative policymaking. In any case his main focus was institution building in the academic world of industrial relations, rather than policymaking in the political world, and his legacy continues today in the British Journal of Industrial Relations and the International Labour and Employment Relations Association.     

Competition in Political Markets

The political 'convergence theorem' argues that, in countries where there are two main parties or coalitions, their policies tend to converge. In Economic Affairs, January-March 1985, Professor Josef Molsberger traced the rise and fall of the social market in Germany. With the ascent in Britain of the Social Democratic Party and the demise of Labour, Lord Bruce-Gardyne and Dick Taverne reflect on the prospects for convergence between SDP and Conservatives, on policies to liberalise the British economy. Both are Treasury Ministers.     

The Invisible Finger: Markets under the Tories

Critics of Mrs Thatcher's Government have complained that it is failing to implement the radical economic policies for which it was elected Michael Fallon, Conservative MP for Darlington, contrasts the Government's achivements with the standards it had set itself. He argues that the more fundamental reform of the economy promised in its electoral manifesto could make the Conservative Party the natural refuge of the under-privileged.     

Editorial Comment

The fact that the Conservative Party won the general election in June means that its policy for the reform of the British system of industrial relations is now of immediate relevance to all who are concerned with that system—either as practitioners or as students. The industrial relations policies of the Conservatives have been tossed about in public debate and, in the process, may have lost some of their clarity. It would seem to us, therefore, that it is both important and relevant to examine exactly what the Conservative Party has said in its policy document, Fair Deal at Work,¹ and what major points were added at the Party's Conference last year.     

Forecast Summary

We have assumed a Conservative victory in an autumn General Election and the continuation of policies aimed at a gradual reduction of inflation in the medium term. The outlook for 1987 is for a more broadly-based expansion of demand and output growth in excess of 3 per cent. This is combined with a large current account deficit and an increase in inflation. But signs are emerging that UK industry is now responding to last year's improvement in competitiveness and the forecast suggests that, over the next four years, the economy should combine non-oil output growth of 3 per cent with inflation of a similar order of magnitude.     

Will Labour’s Economic Programme Work?

If Labour is elected to government on 1 May, it will inherit the lowest inflation of any incoming government over the last fifty years but the highest unemployment. At the same time, public borrowing is running at an unsustainable high level. In this article, Andrew Sentance examines Labour's plans to expand employment while reducing public borrowing and containing inflation. He argues that Labour's economic programme could work but a number of pitfalls need to be avoided. Monetary policy will need to be tightened after the Election and the fiscal squeeze implied by Conservative spending plans maintained – if necessary through higher taxes. The benefits from Labour's employment policies could also be undermined by a high minimum wage, particularly if applied to young workers.     

Government Popularity and the Economic Cycle

In June 1987 the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher were re-elected with a majority of over 100 seats against Labour. They received 42.3 per cent of the total vote, the size of the majority owing much to the significant number of votes received by third parties. But it is also believed that the Conservatives' share of the vote, unchanged from 1983, reflected the performance of the macro economy. In the four years of Mrs. Thatcher's second term, output rose more than 3 per cent a year and by the time of the election inflation was below 1 per cent, interest rates were under 10 per cent, and unemployment had come back below 3 million. If Mrs. Thatcher and her Cabinet colleagues had planned an economic strategy for the next four (or five) years in order to be in a strong position to win a fourth term of office, it might have included the following factors: output growth of 2–3 per cent a year; inflation staying around 1 per cent; interest rates of 10 per cent or thereabouts; unemployment down further from the near-3 million mark of June 1987. On our current forecast, that is, with the exception of output, the economic record of the Conservatives' third (Thatcher/Major) term. Yet the Conservatives have been running neck and neck with Labour in tile opinion polls and, barring unforeseen developments, the coming election will be extremely close, with the possibility still of either a small Conservative majority or a small Labour majority or even a hung Parliament. Why is it that, against the background of a similar economic performance in aggregate, the Conservatives have lost popularity? The arguments are complex and a full explanation would include the introduction of the community charge arid the fall of Mrs. Thatcher herself. But the economy is part of the explanation. The economic literature on Government popularity examines the state of a number of economic variables at the time of the election. At its most extreme, some believe that all a Government has to do to be re-elected is deliver a low mortgage rate in time for the election. Other analysts have explained Government popularity in a simple regression framework, with a lagged dependent variable to capture sluggish adjustment. A weakness of this research is that it implicitly believes all the Government has to do is to ‘get it right on the night’. As long as the economy falls into place by the time of the election, re-election is certain. This implies that the electorate both forgets and forgives, and is indifferent to the course of the economy in the previous three or four years. But it cannot be the case that the electorate evaluates only the average performance of the economy over the lifetime of a Parliament or even the most recent developments. As in any simple utility maximisation problem, it is not just the mean of the distribution that counts but also its variance. In other words the combination of late 1980s' boom and early 1990s' recession counts against the Government in a way that four or five years of steady progress would not have done. If this is correct, it may not be sufficient for the Government to deliver low inflation and interest rates and some recovery in output in time for the election; it may simply be that the electorate remains unforgiving of a five-year track record of boom and bust.     

Optimal forecasts in the presence of structural breaks

This paper considers the problem of forecasting under continuous and discrete structural breaks and proposes weighting observations to obtain optimal forecasts in the MSFE sense. We derive optimal weights for one step ahead forecasts. Under continuous breaks, our approach largely recovers exponential smoothing weights. Under discrete breaks, we provide analytical expressions for optimal weights in models with a single regressor, and asymptotically valid weights for models with more than one regressor. It is shown that in these cases the optimal weight is the same across observations within a given regime and differs only across regimes. In practice, where information on structural breaks is uncertain, a forecasting procedure based on robust optimal weights is proposed. The relative performance of our proposed approach is investigated using Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical application to forecasting real GDP using the yield curve across nine industrial economies.     

Economic Outlook 1985- 1989: The London Business School with Gower Publishing: Forecast Release: THE AUTUMN STATEMENT: IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM

In announcing significant increases in public spending in the Autumn Statement, the government has recognised that the scope for further interest rate reductions ahead of the election is virtually nil. It has therefore sought to boost demand, and its own popularity, by a fiscal relaxation. It so doing, it is prepared to risk a PSBR. (excluding privatization) of £27bn, exactly in line with the estimates which we made in June of Labour Party policy. In terms of macroeconomic policy, therefore, the gap between the two parties is virtually closed, while that between Mr. Major's government and that of Mrs. Thatcher is evident. Front this starting point, we argue that honouring Mr. Laniont's pledge on income tax could be at the expense of removing tax relief on mortgage interest payments and that a Labour government which still cherishes higher public spending may be forced into continuing the privatization programme. Under either Party there is a strong political case for tax increases, or for rescinding some of the planned increase in spending, early in the life of the next Parliament in order to bring the economic and political cycles back into synchronisation from which they were disturbed by Mr. Lawson's tax-cutting Budget of 1988.     

Trade unions and the third round of political fund review balloting

The Trade Union Act 1984 required trade unions to reballot their members on continuation of their political funds. In the 1980s, and again in the 1990s, all unions voted for retention. A third round of balloting has now taken place. This article reports a further round of success, analyses the outcomes and compares this round with the two previous rounds. The results are considered in the light of the changing relationship between unions and the Labour Party as part of the ongoing ‘contentious alliance’. A distinction is drawn between the right to campaign politically and direct links to the Labour Party.     

Public service restructuring in the UK: the case of the English National Health Service

This article overviews welfare state retrenchment in the UK under the Conservative‐led coalition government that formed in May 2010 and has centred its response to economic crisis on rapid public deficit reduction through public expenditure austerity targeted increasingly on the welfare benefits budget. It locates the coalition's reforms of public services and public sector employment relations in the long trajectory of public sector restructuring in the UK: the policies of New Right governments in the 1980s and New Labour from 1997 to 2010 that installed marketisation and privatisation in a permutation of forms, intensifying challenges for trade union organising. Focusing on the English NHS, the article identifies the respects in which the coalition's reforms continue and depart from New Labour's.     

Modernization,Neighbourhood Management and Social Inclusion

Social inclusion is a central goal of the UK New Labour Government, which it is aiming to achieve partly through neighbourhood interventions. This article argues that achieving social inclusion requires a combination of New Labour policies for democratic renewal and tackling social exclusion and it identifies four dimensions along which activity towards social inclusion can be judged. The article draws on evidence from one English city to highlight the contribution of neighbourhood policies and programmes to social inclusion. It considers the strengths and limitations of three approaches and concludes that to achieve social inclusion the collective capacity of the three approaches is essential. However, closer examination of the Government's proposals suggests several obstacles to achieving their combined potential. A particular obstacle is the marginalization of local government and its unique contribution and the article concludes that without this New Labour is will fail to deliver on a key component of social inclusion.     

Political opinion polls and the stock market

It is a part of the received wisdom of the American and British stock exchanges that the market prefers a Conservative administration. However, attempts to test this proposition by examining market returns about the time of elections have produced contrasting and sometimes indecisive results. The present paper assumes that election outcomes will be largely anticipated by the market on the basis of published opinion forecasts. The paper examines the impact of opinion poll information on share prices over the period 1960–79—one largely characterized by two-party competition. It is found that opinion movements towards the Conservative Party do exert a significant positive impact on the market, but only where the two main parties are relatively evenly balanced.     

新时代基层服务型党组织建设的推进策略

党的基层组织是确保党的政策落实贯彻的基础。它可以完善和加强基层党组织建设工作,是促进党组织基础巩固的重大措施,也是加强基层事业发展的条件之一。因此,基层党组织要坚持与时俱进、改革创新,贯彻党的决定,推动基层党组织事业稳固发展,强化阵地建设,为人民群众搭建好服务平台,为基层工作提供有力保障。     

British Economic Decline

UK economic activity is expanding faster than in Europe, but its recovery begins from a very low ebb. Since the war the UK economy has lagged far behind the West as a whole. Why? Professor Olson offers an explanation - pressure-group power, a new mercantilism encouraged or tolertated by Conservative and Labour Governments. The urgency of economic liberation is indicated by other economists in following articles.     

CLASSICAL LIBERALISM IN THE LIBERAL PARTY SINCE 1886

Although the Liberal Party has seen a clear shift towards social liberalism as its main philosophy since 1890 and has seen a series of defections to the Conservative Party, there has been a classical liberal element within the party throughout this period. Moreover, even when such people have left the Party they have typically not gone over to conservatism but have rather entered the world of think tanks and independent thought. Others have stayed in the party. This reflects the way that supporters of the ideas have rejected conservative social attitudes and have worked out a radical market position.     

Workers' Egalitarianism: 'Social Contract' and the Theory of Second-Best

How egalitarian are workers in eastern Europe? Jan Winiecki of the Institute for Labour Economics in Warsaw, argues that opposition to reform is based on fear that cosmetic reforms will only reinforce the inefficiencies of the current system rather than egalitarianism.     

A Dutch disease approach into the premature deindustrialization

We explore the main causes and consequences of the premature deindustrialization phenomena. We argue that local currency overvaluations mainly associated with a surge in capital inflows into the emerging market economies following the deregulation of their capital accounts severely hurt the output share of manufacturing industry. Applying the second generation estimators allowing for cross-section dependency (Augmented Mean Group and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group), we run a panel data regression model based on a sample of 39 developing countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, North America, and Europe from 1960 to 2017. We show that the baseline regression results are robust to different data sets, alternative real exchange rate/deindustrialization measurements, and dynamic model specifications. We find that an overvaluation of 50% which corresponds approximately to one and half standard deviations is associated with a contraction of manufacturing output share as high as 1,25% over the five year period. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the manufacturing competencies which have been eroded by local currency overvaluations in real terms cannot simply be brought back during the undervaluation periods. Hence, the need for a comprehensive industrial policy along with a firm use of capital controls and macroprudential measures given a robust institutional framework comes out as the main policy implication of our results, and they are duly discussed in light of recent developments in the literature.