This book addresses the sustained failure to properly fund local government in England. While there has been plenty of rhetoric and policy initiatives around devolution of power to local authorities in recent decades, continuing recently with the English Devolution Bill, there has been far less attention paid to how these endeavours will be practically delivered and, most importantly, funded. In this context, the motivation in this book is to consider how local government in England could ...

In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as 'rentier capitalism', in which ownership of key types of scarce assets - such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms - is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today's economy, everybody e...

Countries with smaller governments grow faster.Tobacco taxes are the best way to cut smoking.Government regulation discourages entrepreneurshi****p.Award-winning investigative journalist Tom Bergin digs into eight mantras widely accepted by Western governments and, by talking to the people who promote those ideas and the workers, businesspeople and consumers who have felt their impacts, finds they often don't play out...

Unlike most public servants, top administrators – those who manage thousands of personnel and oversee millions of dollars in public spending – are appointed by the head of government. At the Pleasure of the Crown is a detailed exploration of this central but overlooked aspect of governing.Christopher A. Cooper analyzes the appointment of deputy ministers in Canada’s provincial bureaucracies over the last century. As the nature of governance has shifted – from limited gover...

'A pragmatic focus on how much better and fairer our economy would be if fewer resources were controlled by the super-rich' 'Financial Times'**‘This, right now, with no excuses, no delays,**no equivocation, no loop-holes, no moaning’ Danny Dorling‘A concise, sharp book that makes an incontrovertible case for a profound redistribution of wealth; and a rousing call to arms to take on the super-rich and build an economy that works for ...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Guy Standing's immensely influential 2011 book introduced the Precariat as an emerging mass class, characterized by inequality and insecurity. Standing outlined the increasingly global nature of the Precariat as a social phenomenon, especially in the light of the social unrest characterized by the Occupy movements. He outlined the pol...

Winner of the Porter Prize, this classic study thoroughly profiles the corporate elite of late twentieth-century Canada, within a global context. It traces the fundamental changes in the structure of corporate power in Canada since the mid-1970s and highlights such key issues as the place of Canadian corporate power in global context, the westward shift of Canadian corporate power, and the emergence of a North American corporate elite. The book opens with a survey of corporate power and disc...

With an accessible style and clear structure, Miranda Stewart explains how taxation finances government in the twenty-first century, exploring tax law in its historical, economic, and social context. Today, democratic tax states face an array of challenges, including the changing nature of work, the digitalisation and globalisation of the economy, and rebuilding after the fiscal crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stewart demonstrates the centrality of taxation for government budgets and expl...

Pushed by the Covid-19 crisis, the UK government has borrowed massively to save jobs, businesses and the economy from collapse, making a mockery of the austerity policies that it had championed for a decade. As a result, the role of the state is now in sharp focus. The contributors to this volume assess what that role should be and how it should be harnessed for the good of the British people in all four of its nations. Together they present policy proposals capable of generating a new soc...

In 2008 Ireland experienced one of the most dramatic economic crises of any economy in the world. It remains at the heart of the international crisis, sitting uneasily between the US and European economies. Not long ago, however, Ireland was celebrated as an example of successful market-led globalisation and economic growth. How can we explain the Irish crisis? What does it tell us about the causes of the international crisis? How should we rethink our understanding of contemporary economi...

Over the last fifteen years, the deregulation of Britain's labour market has led to economic growth, employment opportunities, and a more diverse workforce: the 'fat years'. However, now as Britain faces its lean years with job cuts, rising unemployment, income insecurity, and related social strains, how can and should the government and key labour market policy makers ensure the labour market provides job opportunities and reasonable levels of social justice?The fundamental changes that h...

A bold agenda for a better way to assess societal well-being, by three of the world's leading economists and statisticians"If we want to put people first, we have to know what matters to them, what improves their well-being, and how we can supply more of whatever that is."—Joseph E. StiglitzIn 2009, a group of economists led by Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and Nobel laureate ...