Marking the 250th anniversary year of the publication of the Wealth of Nations, in the second of a series of blogs on the contemporary relevance of Adam Smith’s work, the Insights team take a look at his nuanced, changing assessment of the English Navigation Acts
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith put forward four general principles that he judged a tax system should satisfy. While the economic system then was much smaller and much less complex than now – the revenue required by the state funded a much narrower range of activities – principles are relatively enduring across changes in contexts.
In this paper, Daniel Pryor argues that competition interventions in digital markets have often been premised on faulty economic assumptions and therefore led to various unintended consequences
In this new piece in our Past Learnings Series, George Yarrow discusses the publicly perceived “untrustworthiness” of politicians
Scaling geologic time to (say) one year, homo sapiens has existed for less than an hour. In that twinkling of an eye, we have developed some capacity for foresight – an enormous evolutionary leap in one of nature’s creatures.
The 6th piece in our series Past Learnings, this piece is an extensive re-working of a paper first published in September 2016, which was likewise a thought experiment on a potential regulatory approach to the control of migration flows
The RPI’s latest piece in our Past Learnings Series discusses the complexity of economic systems and the common inability of policy-makers to fully account for that complexity when making policy changes.
“Change” was the slogan of the British Labour Party in the recent General Election. It certainly didn’t do serious damage to electoral prospects; but it
This is a write-up of the session “Statistics in Regulation and Policy“, given at the RPI Annual Competition and Regulation Conference 2024. This may seem
Our 4th paper in our Past Learnings series, this short paper discusses the division of labour within the organisational and institutional structures that we call