Skip to main content
Comment, analysis, and debate by CEP researchers on today's economic and social policy issues.
Post-16 educational investment can significantly improve young people’s career prospects at a time when NEET rates are rising.
The renters’ rights bill offers clear gains for tenants, but some measures may make being a landlord harder.
Rules preventing the purchase of soy grown on land cleared after 2008 slowed deforestation in the Amazon and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. But now pressure is mounting in Brazil for the rules to be loosened. Rhamon T...Read more...
Joao Paulo Pessoa
28 November 2025
Productivity powers economic growth and shapes living standards. Yet the UK continues to falter on both counts. Low productivity and weak investment have become defining features of the economy, and this year's Budget wi...Read more...
Aadya Bahl
25 November 2025
Swati Dhingra of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee argues that UK inflation is more similar to Europe than it seems, and therefore rate cuts are possible without threatening the return of inflation to targe...Read more...
Swati Dhingra
24 November 2025
Productivity powers economic growth and raises living standards. But the UK has witnessed a prolonged period of stagnation, marked by weak economic productivity growth. While the reasons behind this slowdown are often de...Read more...
The new Renters' Rights Act introduces provisions to protect tenants in England against rent increases. While the UK government says it "does not support the introduction of rent controls", the act does allow tenants to ...Read more...
Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta
21 November 2025
The business school professor shares insights on the human cost of change, making progress without a playbook, and how leaders can turn AI experiments into a competitive advantage. ...Read more...
Raffaella Sadun
19 November 2025
The relationship between economic growth and happiness is not as straightforward as it first appears. While higher income is associated with greater wellbeing, other factors like healthcare and friendship are important t...Read more...
Andrew E. Clark, Richard Layard and Ekaterina Oparina
17 November 2025
In 2025 the proportion of young British people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training was at its highest since 2014. How much impact do educational choices made at that age have on future careers...Read more...
Chiara Cavaglia and Sandra McNally
13 November 2025
The accelerating shift to clean energy and advanced technologies is redrawing the map of global economic power. As nations and firms race to secure critical minerals, rare earths - small in trade value but high in strate...Read more...
Gavin Harper and Viet Nguyen-Tien
31 October 2025
What does a £180,000 job ad for a private tutor *for a baby* reveal about the global education arms race? It's tempting to put it down to the eccentric indulgence of a tiny global elite. But it in fact points to an expl...Read more...
Lee Elliot Major
29 October 2025
Many elements of the renters' rights bill are likely to improve the lives of renters without harming landlords. But some of the improvements for tenants will make being a landlord more difficult or even, for some, undesi...Read more...
24 October 2025
Can entire markets strategically confuse consumers to raise prices? This column tracks the prices of nearly all mobile phone tariffs and handsets in the UK from 2010 to 2012, and finds that quality-adjusted prices rise i...Read more...
Christos Genakos, Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle
23 October 2025
For two decades, the UK economy has seen weak growth, driven by low business investment, inadequate market dynamism and persistent policy instability. These failures shape the daily reality of households whose living sta...Read more...
22 October 2025
John Van Reenen writes about the profound influence of Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion's work not only on growth and industrial organisation, but also on fields as diverse as trade, labour, taxation, the environment, poli...Read more...
John Van Reenen
20 October 2025
Wars devastate infrastructure and institutions, but their most profound costs are often borne by human capital. Education systems are among the first casualties of conflict: schools are destroyed, and families are displa...Read more...
Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, James Gresham, Renata Lemos, Harry A. Patrinos and Rony Rodriguez-Ramirez
2 October 2025
Students of private and grammar schools are over-represented in elite universities. While some of that is explained by better grades, therse is also a degree of mismatch between how well students do in exams and the qual...Read more...
Jo Blanden, Oliver Cassagneau-Francis, Lindsey Macmillan and Gill Wyness
This blog is the third in our new series on the drivers of productivity. The drivers of productivity include skills, capital, innovation, enterprise and competition, and land. This blog focuses on innovation, and complem...Read more...
Anamaria Tibocha-Nino
30 September 2025
Schools are lauded for their ability to keep young people away from crime and on the right path. But what happens behind the school gates? Janine Boshoff and Matteo Sandi reveal a more complex story - one where schoolyar...Read more...
Janine Boshoff and Matteo Sandi
Mobile connectivity can have a positive economic impact on jobs and incomes. But how does it shape household wealth inequality? Zhiwu Wei, Neil Lee and Yohan Iddawela investigate. The Philippines serves as the ideal case...Read more...
Yohan Iddawela, Neil Lee and Zhiwu Wei
23 September 2025
The consensus says that it's a bad tax, yet politicians have been shying away from reforming council tax for decades. Paul Cheshire offers an alternative that could be fairer and act as the wealth tax that many are calli...Read more...
Paul Cheshire
16 September 2025
