Taxi Licensing Follow-Up Study: Summary of Main Results

This paper presents the findings of a survey of taxi licensing policy in England and Wales in mid 1989. The survey acts partly as a follow-up study to earlier work reported earlier in this series (Toner 1989 WP 273) and partly as a vehicle for the assessment of a number of additional issues. These issues form the key to an understanding of the consequences to both consumers of taxi services and road users more generally of the decision to either retain or remove restrictions on entry to the hackney carriage trade. The results presented are purely corss-sectional in nature and do not include a treatment of the important issues of price and service effects. These topics will form the basis of further papers (see, for example Pells, (1990) WP 290 for initial findings on values of waiting time and price elasticities in the hackney market)

Taxi Licensing Follow-Up Study: Summary of Main Results

This paper presents the findings of a survey of taxi licensing policy in England and Wales in mid 1989. The survey acts partly as a follow-up study to earlier work reported earlier in this series (Toner 1989 WP 273) and partly as a vehicle for the assessment of a number of additional issues. These issues form the key to an understanding of the consequences to both consumers of taxi services and road users more generally of the decision to either retain or remove restrictions on entry to the hackney carriage trade. The results presented are purely corss-sectional in nature and do not include a treatment of the important issues of price and service effects. These topics will form the basis of further papers (see, for example Pells, (1990) WP 290 for initial findings on values of waiting time and price elasticities in the hackney market)

User Response to New Road Capacity: A Review of Published Evidence

This paper presents a review of the known evidence on the various aspects of user response to new road capacity. The traffic effects of-new road capacity have important implications for the appraisal of road schemes. The conventional method for inter-urban roads (and increasingly for urban road projects) assumes that the volume of trips, and their destination between pairs of zones, is given. The only response to new investment that is modelled is re-assignment between routes. Relative to this, new road capacity creates the potential for several effects. These effects include:- (1) Wide area re-assignment, involving re-routing of trips external to the study area. (2) Redistribution of trips to different destinations. (3) Attraction of trips from other modes. (4) Re-timing of trips. (5) Generation of trips, consisting of trips which are either entirely new or are made more frequently. Section 2 details the work which has been conducted to analyse the response to particular road construction schemes, this is largely but not exclusively made up of before and after measurements of traffic flows. Section 3 reviews the more diverse work which is not specific to any particular scheme; this work is concentrated on the modal diversion and departure time aspects of user response. Section 4 presents an overview of the literature on land use/ development effects. The final section draws together the available evidence on the scale of each of effects 1-5 above. Of these, trip re-timing is found to be of high importance, especially in the context of urban trips

The Demand for Taxi Services in Sheffield: An Empirical Study of the Value of Waiting Time and the Price Elasticity of Demand

This paper reports the empirical results from a study into the value of taxi passengers1 waiting time and the price elasticity of demand for taxis in Sheffield using stated preference and transfer price data. It is in two parts. The first part details the stated preference design, implementation and results. The effects on the value of time estimates of changes in the depth of ranking modelled, non-linearities, and socio-economic and use variables are assessed. The second part of the paper describes an analysis of the sensitivity of demand for taxi services to increased price using a transfer price approach

Productivity Measurement in the Digital Age

Mismeasurement of productivity is one possible explanation for the global productivity slowdown in recent decades. This article discusses the challenges of measuring productivity in the digital age. The article covers some background about the productivity slowdown and about productivity measurement, the pressure that the growth in the digital economy is putting on productivity measurement, some estimates of mismeasurement from other countries, and the implications for New Zealand. The main conclusion is that, despite measurement issues, the productivity slowdown in New Zealand and elsewhere cannot simply be written off as measurement error. A further conclusion is that the digital economy has many benefits that fall outside conventional productivity measurement

Reassessing frontline medical practitioners of the British civil wars in the context of the seventeenth-century medical world

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordMedical provision in Civil War armies has generally suffered a poor reputation. Medical matters have been excluded from assessments of how far Civil War armies confirm evidence of the so-called ‘Military Revolution’, whilst Harold Cook argued that it was not until after the Glorious Revolution that the medical infrastructure of the armed forces was brought in line with continental practices, particularly those of the Dutch army. Despite the recent rehabilitation of early modern practitioners elsewhere, frontline military practitioners continue to be dismissed as uneducated, unskilful and incompetent. This is largely due to the lack of a fresh perspective since C. H. Firth published Cromwell's Army in 1902. This article argues that the English were well aware of current medical practice in European armies and endeavoured to implement similar procedures during the Civil Wars. Indeed, almost all the developments identified by Cook for the later seventeenth century can be found in Civil War armies. Whilst failures may have occurred, most of these can be attributed to administrative and financial miscarriages, rather than ignorance of contemporary medical developments. Moreover, there is little to suggest that medics mobilized for Civil War armies were any less capable than those who practised civilian medicine in this period.This article draws on research undertaken whilst a postdoctoral research associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘The Medical World of Early Modern England, Wales and Ireland, c. 1500–1715’ at the University of Exeter (grant reference number 097782/Z/11/Z)

Changing Children's Lives: Risks and Opportunities

This paper summarises emerging findings from the Young Lives longitudinal study of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, Peru and Vietnam. It examines how children’s development is shaped by different environmental influences, highlighting the changes in children’s daily lives during the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the changing nature of risks and opportunities. We offer six key research messages, focusing on: 1. how the poorest children continue to be left behind despite rising living standards overall, illustrated by the increased concentration of stunting. 2. the vulnerability of children in poor households to repeated environmental and economic shocks and the potential of social protection schemes to alleviate these problems. 3. how rapid changes in people’s living environment, such as the expansion of basic services, roads and communications, bring new opportunities but also risk reinforcing the social exclusion of poor and marginalised children. 4. the current shortfalls in school quality, effectiveness and relevance that limit the potentially transformative power of education. 5. how children continue to face competing pressures on their time through combining schooling with traditional work roles and contributions to the household. 6. how rapid social change is creating new dilemmas within households and communities about how best to protect children and prepare them for the future

From Infancy to Adolescence : Growing Up in Poverty

The analysis takes account of initial household circumstances and characteristics (such as being in the poorest or least-poor tercile in terms of household wealth) recorded in the first survey round, when Younger Cohort children were aged 1 and the Older Cohort children were aged 8. The authors explore how children and young people’s trajectories diverge over time; and we provide preliminary findings on education, nutrition and youth transitions to higher education, work and marriage and parenthood, from the latest survey round. The researchers find that the poorest children, those in rural areas and/or from marginalised social groups, are consistently being ‘left behind’ in terms of nutritional status, learning and opportunities to continue in education. We conclude by considering how policy interventions at different stages of the early life course can mitigate the development of such inequalities