Europe, Free Movement and the UK

IPPR is clear in saying that free movement within the European Union brings great benefits to all of its member states, including the UK. The fact that every European citizen has the right to move around the EU for work, study or lifestyle is one of the European Union's most significant achievements. Over the past few decades, free movement has improved the efficiency of European labour markets, created opportunities for cultural and educational exchange, and allowed people to permanently relocate to another country for family reasons or for retirement. Indeed, recent research has indicated that the UK's exports to the European Union support more than 4 million British jobs and are worth £211 billion to the economy

Maximising the Development Outcomes of Migration: A Policy Perspective

It is becoming increasingly clear that migration can have important impacts upon development. As a result, policymakers are searching for ways to increase migration’s developmental benefits, and decrease its costs. This paper examines the levers at their disposal. We recognise the importance of the policy instruments which receive the most attention – migration policy (especially rules about entry and exit) and development policy (in particular migration’s place in national development strategies and donor cooperation policies). However, we suggest that to maximise benefits and minimise costs, policy thinking must be broadened and made more coherent. We set out in a systematic manner the ways in which migration impacts upon development. We then analyse how the process of migration and development creates those impacts, and suggest where policy can intervene in the process to improve outcomes. We illustrate our analysis with a number of policy case studies.migration, development, policy

Markov-switching generalized additive models

We consider Markov-switching regression models, i.e. models for time series regression analyses where the functional relationship between covariates and response is subject to regime switching controlled by an unobservable Markov chain. Building on the powerful hidden Markov model machinery and the methods for penalized B-splines routinely used in regression analyses, we develop a framework for nonparametrically estimating the functional form of the effect of the covariates in such a regression model, assuming an additive structure of the predictor. The resulting class of Markov-switching generalized additive models is immensely flexible, and contains as special cases the common parametric Markov-switching regression models and also generalized additive and generalized linear models. The feasibility of the suggested maximum penalized likelihood approach is demonstrated by simulation and further illustrated by modelling how energy price in Spain depends on the Euro/Dollar exchange rate

Migration policy must be based on more than just numbers

Debate regarding immigration in the UK is highly charged and often consists of the use (or misuse) of statistics to underline one’s argument. While it is important to consistently challenge purposeful misrepresentations of facts that worsen perceptions of migration, Alex Glennie argues that countering numbers with yet more numbers will only reinforce the existing reductive framing of the debate, and confuse or alienate the public further. Treating migrants as statistics rather than people fails to recognise the complex emotional drivers of public attitudes

From Billions to Millions: How Community Philanthropy is Helping to Finance the SDGs

Community philanthropy is a growing sector across the world, but its progress has gone largely unnoticed in the world of mainstream "development financing." This is unfortunate for two main reasons. First, because there might be a significant amount of money at the community level that is already being, or could be, mobilized for the SDG effort. And second, perhaps even more importantly, because the quality of that money in terms of its unique characteristics make it a resource worth focusing on. At a time when all the stops are being pulled out to find funds to meet the SDGs, this unique source of finance is being overlooked.This paper looks at four areas where community philanthropy has an intrinsic advantage over other external forms of finance (including domestic public finance from far-off capital cities) and ends with two sets of ideas/recommendations, first for the community philanthropy sector, and second for those working in development finance

Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug in Modernism

This project argues that by reading first-person accounts of drug intoxication in European modernism, one can uncover qualitative structures that broadly inform the modernist experience of space, time, language, desire, and embodiment. Evidence for this systematization of subjective experience appears in the early twentieth-century movements of phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and even structural linguistics. In addition to their systemic approach to subjective experience, however, these movements also insist that some form of psychic or existential discomfort is inherent to modern experience, and all of them engage in a marked attempt to address this pain therapeutically. Thus while modernist thought conceives of experience within a certain set of qualitative structures, it also aims to alleviate the pain that these structures conversely make possible. By reading the first-person accounts of Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Benjamin, I argue that representations of drug intoxication reveal the extent to which European modernists draw upon similar qualitative structures when giving form to their experiences. More specifically, I argue that it is by moving incrementally toward death while stopping short of it that the modernist subject achieves a therapeutic experience through drug intoxication. This method of palliation ultimately reveals that in modernist thought, the subject is located on an experiential spectrum spreading from the pole of discrete, reflexive consciousness to the utter non-being of death. In the interest of exploring this spectrum, I read Cocteau, Huxley, and Benjamin’s work through the theory of Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger

Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina

For a three-year time period beginning in 2001, North Carolina awarded an annual bonus of $1,800 to certified math, science and special education teachers working in high poverty or academically failing public secondary schools. Using longitudinal data on teachers, we estimate hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program%u2019s implementation, across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers, and across eligible and barely-ineligible schools. Results suggest that this bonus payment was sufficient to reduce mean turnover rates of the targeted teachers by 12%. Experienced teachers exhibited the strongest response to the program. Finally, the effect of the program may have been at least partly undermined by the state%u2019s failure to fully educate teachers regarding the eligibility criteria. Our estimates most likely underpredict the potential outcome of a program of permanent salary differentials operating under complete information.

Oral History Interview: Glennie T. Burford

This interview is one of a series conducted with West Virginia farmers about growing up on farms and about the farming business. In 1974, Mr. Burford was a farmer living near Elkview, West Virginia. He has worked as a farmer throughout his adult life. In this interview he discusses his land, family, and conservation.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1114/thumbnail.jp

Structure of the skiddaw slates in the north-west Lake District

In an area of complex folding, few fossils and no marker- horizons, classical methods of analysing structures have limited use. The area studied was divided into 64 sub -areas, and the attitude of bedding plotted on 0-diagrams to give a statistical trend and plunge for the fold - axes in each sub -area. The trend and plunge of the axes of 117 small folds were measured, and the orientations of lineations formed by the intersection of bedding and cleavage were noted at over 200 localities. All these structures suggest that there is a weakly developed axis of large scale folding trending N240 °E and plunging 15 °. This axis is statistically accurate only for the area as a whole; and it is thought to be locally affected by the emplacement of the Ennerdale Granophyre. There is a low degree of mutual parallelism of the axes of folding which may indicate repeated deformation; but it is thought more likely to be caused by limited deformation of incompetent rocks at shallow depth. A tectonic profile constructed for the south- western part of the area gives an indication of the large scale structure of the slates