News Archive 2012

Localised means-tests and student fees, the end result can be overlapping systems that are complex, hard to compare, and have undesirable side-effects.

Recent work from John Hills and Ben Richards, CASE paper 160 examines the means-tested support which has been offered to English students applying to go to 52 universities from Autumn 2012. Designed partly to offset the rise in general fees to or towards £9,000, 27 of these universities are offering significant levels of means-tested support through bursaries or fee reductions depending on parental income. Using a common income definition, each university has designed its own system with widely varying criteria. Taken with the national maintenance grant system, these imply substantially different levels of support for students from lower and higher-income families.

John Hills discusses on LSE British Policy and Politics blog, the efforts to protect the poorest from some of the effects of the rise in fees, and how‘localised’ decision-making is leading to an increase in the numbers of means tests designed by lower level institutions. He suggest this is creating a very complex and varied approach to student financial support, with high effective marginal taxation rates for some families.

In New Statesman online Gavin Kelly (Resolution Foundation) queries whether this is a tax on aspiration. And in The Guardian online it's discussed how this could potentially undermine policies such as Universal Credit, which aim to simplify the social security system.

Listen to John Hill's interview on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4 on 4th May 2012 on BBC iplayer (the interview starts at 54.29 mins in)

NGO Workshop (Non-Profits, Governments, and Organizations)
chaired by Maitreesh Ghatak

This is part of a series of workshops on this theme that Thierry Verdier (Paris School of Economics), Gani Aldashev (Namur), Emmanuelle Auriol (Toulouse School of Economics) and Maitreesh Ghatak (LSE), have been co-organizing for the last two years.

The importance of non-profits in developed countries in the social sectors is well-recognized. At the same time, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an ever-increasing and fundamental role in designing and carrying out development projects. Therefore, the formulation of effective policies towards the development NGO sector requires a good understanding about how NGOs function, how they perform their activities, what is the effect of the NGOs on development. Given such knowledge, the optimal regulatory framework of the NGO sector can be designed. Thus, both demand for comprehensive body of knowledge about the functioning and performance of the NGO sector is high, both from the policy-makers, the general public, and the NGOs themselves.

With this in mind, the Economic Organization and Public Policy programme at LSE is hosting the workshop NGO (Non-Profits, Governments, and Organizations) which is being funded by STICERD."

The event will take place 25th and 26th of May 2012. The preliminary program can be found on

Falling poverty rates in inner London raise questions about inequality and segregation for a growing city in transition

Alex Fenton looks at what happened to poor neighbourhoods under New Labour in the 2000s, and argues that shifting rates in poverty fail to tell the whole story.

Full article available here from the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog

Final report of the Hills Fuel Poverty Review
Getting the Measure of Fuel Poverty

INDEPENDENT REVIEW PROJECTS FUEL POVERTY TO WORSEN AND CALLS FOR REINVIGORATED  STRATEGY

Professor John Hills today publishes the final report of his independent review of fuel poverty.  The review confirms that fuel poverty is a serious national problem and shows that it is set to rise rapidly.  It affects people with low incomes and energy costs above typical levels. It proposes a new way of measuring the problem, focused both on the number of people affected and the severity of the problem they face. Using the proposed measure:

• Nearly 8 million people in England, within 2.7 million households, both had low incomes and faced high energy costs in 2009 (the most recent year with available data).  These households faced costs to keep warm that added up to £1.1 billion more than middle or higher income people with typical costs.

• The review’s central projection is that this “fuel poverty gap” – already three-quarters higher than in 2003 – will rise by a further half, to £1.7 billion by 2016.

• This means fuel poor households will face costs nearly £600 a year higher on average than better-off households with typical costs.

The report also argues that:

• Fuel poverty exacerbates other hardship faced by those on low incomes, has serious health effects (including contributing to extra deaths every winter), and acts as a block to efforts to cut carbon emissions.

• The current official way of measuring it, based on whether a household would need to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on energy, is flawed, giving a misleading impression of trends, excluding some affected by the problem at some times and including people with high incomes at others.

• Interventions targeted on the core of the problem – especially those that improve the energy efficiency of homes lived in by people with low incomes – can make a substantial difference, but the impact of those planned to be in place by 2016 is only to reduce the problem by a tenth.

Professor Hills said:
There is no doubt that fuel poverty is a serious national problem – increasing hardship, contributing to winter deaths and other health problems, and blocking policies to combat climate change.  But the official measure has fed complacency at times and gloom about the impact of policies at others.
When one focuses on the core of the problem in the way I propose, the outlook is profoundly disappointing, with the scale of the problem heading to be nearly three times higher in 2016 – the date legislation set for its elimination – than in 2003.
But this daunting problem is one with solutions.  Our analysis shows that improving the housing of those at risk is the most cost-effective way of tackling the problem, cutting energy waste, with large long-term benefits to society as a whole.   We need a renewed and ambitious strategy to do this.

Copies of the final report, Getting the measure of fuel poverty, are available to download here and at: www.decc.gov.uk/hillsfuelpovertyreview

For further media enquiries or to request a copy of the summary, contact LSE press office on 020 7955 7060 or at pressoffice@lse.ac.uk

The Wall Street Journal
Where's the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting

What do chief executives do all day? It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings. That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms. Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers.

External article link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204642604577215013504567548.html

Our paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/12-053.pdf

CASE/new economics foundation special event
ABOUT TIME Examining the case for a shorter working week Public Lecture at the LSE

Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building, Lincoln's Inn Fields London WC2A 2AE
11 January 2012, 6.00-7.30 pm

As the economic crisis deepens, it is timely to consider the arguments for moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours – sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. Following the new economics foundation’s highly-acclaimed report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century, CASE and nef are bringing leading experts together to examine the social, environmental and economic implications. They will consider how far a shorter working week can help to address a range of urgent social, economic and environmental problems: unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being and entrenched inequalities. The event features:

• Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, and author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, and The Overworked American;
• Lord Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and biographer of J. M. Keynes, with Dr Edward Skidelsky, University of Exeter, and co-authors the forthcomingbook, How Much is Enough? Economics and the Good Life.
• Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, and author of Prosperity without Growth.

Save the date! This is a public lecture,  with places available to all on a first-come-first-served basis.  Please arrive early to guarantee your place.  Join us afterwards for a drinks reception at 7.30 pm.  

Any enquiries please email: c.j.conner@lse.ac.uk.