Over 40 years ago, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) established its technical Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP). Today, CAEP has completed at an international level twelve cycles of debate, recommendations and policy revisions[1]. Indeed, aviation was the first industrial sector attempting to tackle environmental issues on a global scale: a point unfortunately overlooked by its protagonists. CAEP seeks to achieve a technically driven consensus on issues and in the early days, the emphasis was on noise reduction. This was understandable, because early civ ..read more

On 17 and 18 July, the Vinson Centre at Buckingham University held its annual “Conference in the Classical Liberal Tradition”. The IEA’s Editorial Director, Dr Kristian Niemietz, was invited to give a talk on “The meaning of The Road to Serfdom today”, as part of the session “Hayek Beyond Academia”. The article below is based on his talk.   I am going to talk about how Hayek’s Road To Serfdom has – sadly – become a lot more relevant again over the past ten years or so. I say “sadly”, because I would prefer to live in a world where The Road To Serfdom is not relevant anymore. Where we c ..read more

One of the most bizarre responses I often get when I argue for more housebuilding is that Britain shouldn’t build houses, because if we did, we would run out of farmland. This, the housingsceptics argue, would reduce food self-sufficiency, making us more vulnerable to external shocks. The argument is completely wrong on multiple levels. But given the frequency with which it comes up, apparently, it sounds convincing to a lot of people. So maybe it is worth addressing it. First of all, it is, of course, true that land has multiple, competing potential uses. Apart from farming and residential h ..read more

Britain has experienced a period of relative economic stagnation since migration numbers have risen, despite the clear economic consensus in favour of liberal migration policies. It is understandable that migration sceptics would search for an explanation. Consensus does not imply correctness, so could immigration actually be bad for the economy? One of the main economic arguments among British immigration-sceptics is that liberal immigration policy reduces capital investment. The logic is simple and certainly plausible: Immigration into Britain has hit record levels over the past two ..read more

This weekend saw the 138th Durham Miners’ Gala, that annual nostalgiafest of the labour movement. Ancient banners from long-closed pits, brass bands and fiery speeches: it is a spectacle as traditional and, in its own way, enjoyable as Wimbledon, Trooping the Colour or Lewes Bonfire Night. This year, one of the speakers was Mick Whelan, the General Secretary of the train drivers’ union ASLEF and – as befits a leading figure of the trade union aristocracy – a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Council. Mr Whelan is a fine museum piece example of a dyed-in-the-wool trade union lead ..read more

The Basel Accords are an attempt to make financial markets more resilient. This article[1] argues that the Basel Accords confuse price and property, a mistake that leads to incorrect price discovery for loans, as well as to increased prices and risk in lending. Its argument is based on the analysis of the legal character of risk premiums in the interest rates of loans, and argues for the reduction of risk premiums in accordance with the real default risk that usually diminishes over time. In 1974, a major West German bank, Bankhaus Herstatt, collapsed. In response, the Basel Committee on Bank ..read more

Well, thank goodness that’s over. Elections are rarely edifying spectacles, and this one was worse than most. The Conservatives kicked things off with some appalling policy announcements, and then mostly went negative, accusing Labour of ‘failing to rule out’ various made-up taxes ad nauseam. Labour spent most of the time in safe mode, saying as little as possible in the hopes of winning a large majority by default. And that, of course, is just about how it turned out. So why did things go so wrong for the Conservatives? And what hopes and fears should we have for a Labour government? He ..read more

On 24 June, Sacred Cows, a debating society which organises talks on controversial subjects, held an event entitled “Why Britain should not be proud of the NHS”. The speaker was the IEA’s Editorial Director Dr Kristian Niemietz. The article below is based on his presentation.   In any survey where people are asked what makes them most proud to be British, the NHS always comes out on top, and by quite a margin. Now, I don’t really have a view on what people should, or should not, be proud of – certainly not when it comes to more abstract notions like “national pride”, which are obvious ..read more

Pay and Benefits 1a.) Pensions The biggest difference between compensation packages in the public and private sectors – bearing in mind that there are material differences between different parts of the public sector – is undoubtedly pensions. The scale of this differential, however, is not widely known. Final salary, defined-benefit pension schemes continue to be enjoyed by the vast majority of public sector employees (82%), but are now very rare in the private sector (8%). They are practically non-existent in the SME sphere, where many are dependent on the woefully inadequate auto-enro ..read more

On 12 June 2024, the IEA had invited me to deliver a talk on my paper ‘Predatory Pricing in platform markets: A modified test for firms within the scope of Article 3 of the DMA and super-dominant platform firms under Article 102 TFEU’. I discuss a unique issue that has historically pertained to competition law, but here, I focus on two different but related regimes – Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and the Digital Markets Act Regulation (DMA) 2022. Introduction to predatory pricing My discussion of the paper began with a brief introduction to the e ..read more