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The future of Initial Coin Offerings

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have recently received a lot of attention due to the ban imposed by Chinese regulators. China is not the only country that is concerned about ICOs. On 12th September, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued a warning to consumers about the risks of ICOs.[1] Regulators from the USA, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have also alerted “investors” about the risks associated with ICOs, albeit not...

Does it still pay to be green on Britain’s roads?

What’s changed? On April 1st 2017, the UK government introduced changes to Vehicle Excise Duty (VED). VED has undergone several evolutions in recent years. In 2001, VED was reformed to reflect CO2 emissions rates per kilometre, with 13 bands of increasing CO2 emissions incurring increasing VED costs. The scheme was further reformed in 2013, to introduce separate first year rates which further penalised purchasers of high CO2 emitting...

E-commerce Parcel Delivery: Problems and Possible Solutions

Online shopping and parcel delivery The quality of parcel delivery has become extremely important as more and more people shop online. In the UK, 3 in every 4 adults made an online purchase in 2016, receiving in total over 1 billion parcels. By 2018, the e-commerce market is expected to grow by about one third, to reach 1.3 billion parcels annually. Cross-border shopping is also gaining pace as (in particular) younger consumers search and...

Brexit: A Female Perspective

Before the referendum, it was thought that women were more likely to vote against Brexit than men. Yet, the polls in the lead up to the referendum showed that most women were undecided on the issue[1] and on the day, it turned out that women largely voted in line with men.[2] This is in stark contrast to the 1975 referendum on membership of the European Economic Community when women represented an important part of the “remain”...

The impact of Brexit on M&A activity in the UK: Evidence from 2017 Q1

In the aftermath of the UK’s June 2016 EU referendum, Theresa May announced that a “proper industrial strategy wouldn’t automatically stop the sale of British firms to foreign ones, but it should be capable of stepping in to defend a sector that is as important as pharmaceuticals is to Britain”.[1] Statements of this sort suggest that, post-Brexit, the UK would be more inclined to protect national interests by applying industrial policy...

Why work from home

The overall number of people working from home in the UK has been increasing in the past years reaching 13.9% of all people in work – a record number since comparable records began in 1998.[1] There are sectors – such as agriculture or construction – which by their very nature are located outside an office, always have been. A more interesting thing is a phenomenon of home workers who traditionally would have worked in an office but have...

Self-employment disentangled

There has been a major shift in the labour market towards self-employment with 4.8 million self-employed workers in the last quarter of 2016 — almost a 50% increase compared to 2000. Self-employed profile The trend has been particularly strong for part-time self-employment, which increased by 88% between 2001 and 2015 (compared to only 25% increase in part-time employment in the same period). The number of full-time self-employed workers...

Universal Basic Income

Earlier this month, Finland became the first European country to offer its unemployed citizens a monthly unconditional income of €560 as part of a two-year pilot program aiming to reduce poverty and unemployment.[1] Similarly, the councils of Fife and Glasgow in Scotland[2] piloted analogous programs this year, while similar universal basic income (UBI) schemes can also be found in Canada[3] and Silicon Valley.[4] The UBI concept works on the...

Employment post-Brexit

On July 13, Business insider posted an article based on Credit Suisse report headlined “'Mayday! Mayday!' — Britain's impending recession will kill nearly 500,000 jobs”. Similar predictions by other economists suggested an increase in unemployment post-Brexit, a labour market reaction similar to the financial crisis of 2008. However, data revealed by the ONS suggested that post-Brexit, employment remained stable. In fact, the number of people...

How might the sharing economy affect the world of work?

What is the Sharing Economy? New technologies and innovations have encouraged the rise of novel business models, collectively known as the sharing economy. Although definitions of the sharing economy may differ, the term is predominantly used to describe technology driven market places (platforms) enabling a wide variety of exchanges.[1] The appearance of such platforms has created a new world of business that capitalises on the influence of...

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