A Fiscal Commission or Council for Northern Ireland : Lessons Learned from elsewhere in the UK and Ireland

In 2020, the New Decade New Approach (NDNA) agreement restored power sharing in Northern Ireland. It was designed to represent a fair and balanced basis upon which to restore the institutions that had been created by the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. The period since power sharing collapsed has seen significant powers transferred to the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, following comprehensive reviews of the devolution settlements for each country. No such comprehensive review has been carried out for Northern Ireland, where the purpose is to increase the financial accountability of the parliament. The Commissions in Scotland and Wales are discussed in this document, with the lessons learned from these processes drawn out in detail. This includes a discussion of what devolution has meant in practice, what the wider infrastructure implications are, and what the impact has been on the budgets of devolved governments when these new powers were exercised

Levelling up & Community Renewal : A focus on the Highland Council area

This report examines the indicators used for prioritisation through the Levelling Up Fund, focussing on Highland Council area. Our findings are as follows: The indicators used to demonstrate the need for economic recovery and growth miss crucial economic factors that will impact considerably on Highland’s economic resilience. Some of these measures, such as working age population density, or the outlook for the population, are readily available and could be considered for inclusion in any future assessment of need. The differential impact that COVID-19 is likely to have on certain parts of the country should also be considered in decisions on investment. Our modelling shows that Highland is likely to be one of the areas hardest hit by the pandemic, given its sectoral make up. Given the focus on investment in transport connectivity in the Levelling Up prospectus, it is critical that the relative need for transport investment is captured for Scotland. Highland Council, and other remote and rural areas, would be given much higher priority if this was done. The need for economic regeneration is currently captured fairly crudely. Many of the indicators discussed in the first section, particularly around demography, are relevant for signalling the need for investment to change to projected outcomes. The geography of Highland and its 12 separate labour markets make it much more tricky to make the case that different projects within the local authority area impact on one another, so this should be considered in the packages of proposals put forward

Scoping the Potential Use of Macroeconomic Models to Energy Policies Questions in Northern Ireland : [November 2022]

Integral to the Northern Ireland energy strategy and action plan is the development of an energy evidence programme to aid policymakers in deciding the best course of action to meet targets. This programme should be based upon the best available evidence from a wide range of sources, which includes reviewing existing research, commissioning new research and consulting relevant experts. Within the energy evidence programme a set of priority research areas are outlined, ranging behavioural economics to fuel prices. Of particular importance for this report is the principle of model development mainly the developments of the current Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model required to replicate the type of energy related applications employed by the Scottish and UK energy CGE models. In this report we detail the use of CGE models for energy analysis in Scotland and the UK and how the Northern Ireland model could be extended to carry out similar analysi

State of the Nation 2018 : Infrastructure Investment

Good infrastructure helps transform our society for the better. However, the way we use and interact with this infrastructure is shifting. We face vastly changing demographics, along with increasing urbanisation and digital transformation. We want projects that are built bigger, better and quicker not to mention more resilient. The UK's strategic infrastructure network is what helps make our country run, and politicians from all parties have acknowledged this. As the UK re-positions itself on the global stage, improving the performance of our networks has never been more important

Government expenditure and revenue Scotland (GERS) : a look beyond nearly 30 years of controversy at what it does and doesn't tell us about Scotland

Government Expenditure Revenue Scotland (GERS) remains a controversial statistical publication on Scotland's public finances. We trace the evolution of GERS over time, and track how it has been used in political debate since it was first published in 1992. Now in its 27th edition, we review its ongoing role in informing constitutional and fiscal debate in Scotland. We dispel some of the myths about the publication, but also highlight legitimate criticisms, and explore how it is used by both sides in the independence debate. Our main contribution is to summarise what GERS tells us - and crucially what it does not tell us - about the state of Scotland's economy and public finances. We conclude with an assessment of what GERS might tell us about the prospects for any future debate on Scottish independence

The Aluminium Industry in the UK

In this second instalment of our wider aluminium industry report, we update our estimation of the contribution of the wider aluminium industry with the most recent data and expand the scope by including a larger share of aluminium castings. We also discuss our efforts in, and the challenges of, estimating the economic contribution of aluminium to the UK automotive sector. We estimate the gross value added (GVA) contribution of aluminium in UK passenger vehicles to be approximately £1billion. We however caution the official use of this figure in the absence of more detailed data. Economic indicators for the wider aluminium industry: * The wider aluminium industry directly employs 39,000 people across the UK, with the largest share of those employed located in the West Midlands. * The wider aluminium industry directly contributes around £2.9 billion in GVA to the UK economy The wider aluminium industry is closely tied to many other parts of the UK economy. The production and manufacturing of aluminium goods requires purchasing from suppliers, supporting output, and employment across the UK. Our economic model of the UK has been used to estimate the amount of economic activity supported directly and through spill-over impacts. We find the wider aluminium industry: * Supports the employment of 104,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs across the UK. * Supports the contribution of £7.4 billion in GVA. The FAI produced this report in collaboration with the Aluminium Federation (ALFED). ALFED represents producers and other key stakeholders operating within the wider aluminium industry

The Economic Impact of City of Glasgow College, 2012-2020

In 2010, City of Glasgow College was formed through the merger of Central College Glasgow, Glasgow Metropolitan College, and Glasgow College of Nautical Studies. Its formation secured a £228 million investment into state-of-the-art campuses on Cathedral Street (City Campus) and on the banks of the River Clyde (Riverside Campus). These campuses are large enough to accommodate 40,000 students, making it the largest in Europe. Their design is world-leading with the very latest technology and industry-standard facilities. The College offers around 2,000 courses each year, from Creative Industries to STEM. Full-time and part-time courses are provided, along with distance and work-based learning. As a further and higher education institution, the College offers course that span access level through to degree qualifications. But the College does much more than teach. It is a major employer in Glasgow, supporting jobs – both directly and indirectly – across the local community. And by acting as a key anchor institution in Glasgow, it reaches and engages communities, bringing people together to learn, develop and interact. The 16,000 graduates each year, provide local businesses with a ready supply of workers

Scoping the Potential Use of Macroeconomic Models to Energy Policies Questions in Northern Ireland.

The new Northern Ireland Energy Strategy was published in December 2021 with the primary objective to be net-zero carbon by 2050, and an intermediate target of a 56% reduction in energy related emissions by 2030. The plan sets out a non-exhaustive list of 22 actions to be carried out by the central government, such actions include funding a £10m Green Innovation Challenge and publish an Electric Vehicle (EV) infrastructure action plan. A key element of the Energy Strategy is the Energy Evidence Programme. The evidence programme aims to produce additional evidence to support policy development and identifies a set of key research areas and principles

The Economic Impact of Job Losses in the Civil Aviation and Aerospace Engineering Sectors

The coronavirus outbreak represents the greatest public health crisis in a generation. Whilst the health risk for the families impacted is the most important concern, the pandemic will have a significant economic impact. One part of the economy particularly affected by Covid-19 is tourism-facing sectors. With borders shut down and aircrafts parked in airports from March of this year, there has been a significant knock-on effect to the civil aviation and aerospace engineering sectors. The government’s Job Retention Scheme (JRS) has kept unemployment artificially low while the country is in lockdown however, as they begin scaling back the JRS, the number of job losses across the country will climb. Only now are we beginning to feel the real economic hit caused by the ongoing pandemic. The purpose of this report is to estimate the economic impact that job losses in these sectors could have on the Scottish economy in terms of output, Gross Value Added (GVA) and employment

Improving the Quality of Regional Economic Indicators : Regional Consumer Prices

Building on previous work this paper provides updated prices and inflation estimates for the twelve NUTS-1 regions of the UK. One key issue previously noted when moving to regional prices estimates is the reduction in LCFS sample size leading to unstable weights. In this paper, we investigate the data sources to produce regional expenditure estimates, attempting to increase the accuracy of CPIH estimates. The primary focus is on the Regional Household Final Consumption Expenditure measure (HFCE) publication for use as estimates for regional expenditure weights. While we were able to update the UK regional CPIH estimates to 2020 using other data sources we still encounter similar problems to Dawber and Smith (2017), with the small sample size of the price databases being problematic for the calculation of CPIH indices