An individualised yoga programme for multiple sclerosis: a case study

Purpose Despite the evidence that yoga is beneficial for people with multiple sclerosis (MS),substantial in-depth qualitative studies of yoga and MS, in particular individualized yoga programmes (IYP), are lacking. The aims of this paper are a) to conduct a case study on an IYP for one participant with MS in terms of their experience of yoga and how yoga affects their particular symptoms of MS and b) to better understand the unique and changing needs of someone with MS in the context of an IYP. Design and Method A qualitative case study design with data collected via a participant diary completed over the 24 week duration of IYP; an exit interview after the final IYP session, and weekly records completed by the yoga teacher. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings Over the course of the IYP the female participant experienced an increased awareness of negative thoughts and feelings about MS and how it affected them and their body. As the programme progressed she began to work through these feelings and by the end of the programme reported experiencing improvements in muscle tone, strength,balance, psychological well-being and confidence. Conclusion Our findings highlight the importance of a programme individualized to meet the complex health and psychological needs of an individual with MS

Office Space Supply Restrictions in Britain: The Political Economy of Market Revenge

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office space in continental Europe. Exploiting the panel data, we provide strong support for our hypothesis that the regulatory tax varies according to whether an area is controlled by business interests or residents. Our results imply that the cost of the 1990 change converting commercial property taxes from a local to a national basis – transparently removing any fiscal incentive to permit local development – exceeded any plausible rise in local property taxes.Land use regulation; regulatory costs; business taxation; office markets

Evaluating the effects of planning policies on the retail sector: or do town centre first policies deliver the goods?

Few studies conceive of land as a productive factor but British land use policies may lower total factor productivity (TFP) in the retailing industry by (i) restricting the total availability of land for retail, thereby increasing space costs (ii) directly limiting store size and (iii) concentrating retail development on specific central locations. We use unique store-specific data to estimate the impact of space on retail productivity and the specific effects of planning restrictiveness and micromanagement of store locations. We use the quasi natural experiment generated by the variation in planning policies between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to isolate the impact of town centre first policies. We find that TFP rises with store size and that planning policy directly reduces productivity both by reducing store sizes and forcing retail onto less productive sites. Our results, while they strictly only apply to the supermarket group whose data we analyse, are likely to be representative of supermarkets in general and suggest that since the late 1980s planning policies have imposed a loss of TFP of at least 20%

Business rates: hoorah! But watch out for housing!

Posted by Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber, SERC and LSE At last we have had a serious and radical policy change that really can improve one element of our dysfunctional, policy-induced development morass. As we showed in our 2008 paper the move to convert Business Rates into a purely and transparently national tax largely removed the incentives for Local Authorities (LAs) to permit commercial development. This increased the costs of office space substantially more than any feasible level of business rates might ever have done. Because it just induced an even greater shortage of supply

Planning supermarkets away, for less convenience and variety, higher prices and lower productivity

[By Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber] One of the 'joys' of putting together a serious evidence based analysis of the effects of our planning system is to have planners turn round and dismiss the results because the analysis has not evaluated the benefits of planning. This is especially true since one of us was the first – and still one of the very few – to attempt rigorously to evaluate the net effects of restrictions on land supply; and found them to be substantial and negative in terms of their welfare effects

COVID-19 and housing: while prices may fall, homes will remain unaffordable

Discussing the potential effects of COVID-19 on housing, Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber write that real house prices and rents may initially fall. Yet housing will remain unaffordable for the young and those on lower incomes, especially in London and the South East, as this fall will be driven by a fall in earnings

What will crashing the economy do for the UK housing market?

Discussing the potential effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on housing, Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber write that real house prices and rents may fall in the short- to medium-term. Yet housing will remain unaffordable for the young and those on lower incomes, especially in London and the South East, as this fall will be driven by a fall in earnings

Home truths: options for reforming residential property taxes in England

England’s system of property taxes is in urgent need of reform. Council Tax, devised in a hurry to resolve political difficulties after the demise of the Poll Tax, hits those in low-value homes hardest, and bears at best only a tenuous relationship to today’s house prices. Stamp Duty acts as a tax on moving house, slowing the housing market and making it harder for people to find the right home for them. This report presents the various options to reform the England’s property taxes, assessing them against both economic and political criteria. It concludes by setting out a new approach to taxing English property to mitigate the regressiveness and distortions of the current system, and help achieve government aims of levelling up and delivering net zero

Recovering a lost baseline: missing kelp forests from a metropolitan coast

© 2008 AuthorThere is concern about historical and continuing loss of canopy-forming algae across the world’s temperate coastline. In South Australia, the sparse cover of canopy-forming algae on the Adelaide metropolitan coast has been of public concern with continuous years of anecdotal evidence culminating in 2 competing views. One view considers that current patterns existed before the onset of urbanisation, whereas the alternate view is that they developed after urbanisation. We tested hypotheses to distinguish between these 2 models, each centred on the reconstruction of historical covers of canopies on the metropolitan coast. Historically, the metropolitan sites were indistinguishable from contemporary populations of reference sites across 70 km (i.e. Gulf St. Vincent), and could also represent a random subset of exposed coastal sites across 2100 km of the greater biogeographic province. Thus there was nothing ‘special’ about the metropolitan sites historically, but today they stand out because they have sparser covers of canopies compared to equivalent locations and times in the gulf and the greater province. This is evidence of wholesale loss of canopy-forming algae (up to 70%) on parts of the Adelaide metropolitan coast since major urbanisation. These findings not only set a research agenda based on the magnitude of loss, but they also bring into question the logic that smaller metropolitan populations of humans create impacts that are trivial relative to that of larger metropolitan centres. Instead, we highlight a need to recognise the ecological context that makes some coastal systems more vulnerable or resistant to increasing human-domination of the world’s coastlines. We discuss challenges to this kind of research that receive little ecological discussion, particularly better leadership and administration, recognising that the systems we study out-live the life spans of individual research groups and operate on spatial scales that exceed the capacity of single research providers.Sean D. Connell, Bayden D. Russell, David J. Turner, Scoresby A. Shepherd, Timothy Kildea, David Miller, Laura Airoldi, Anthony Cheshir

Housing in Europe: a different continent - a continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long and rich history, consisting of around 50 countries with vastly different institutional settings and government policies for housing and an abundance of quasi-natural experiments. Some countries have remarkably rich public data and some institutions and policy assumptions are all but the opposite of those familiar to US institutions. In this introduction we briefly outline the seven papers of this issue that exploit in one way or another this extraordinary richness for research. Each paper provides novel insights and has important implications. Collectively, they illustrate the potential opportunities for new and exciting research on housing in Europe