Infrastructure investment - the emergent PPP equity market

Increasingly governments are looking to private sector actors to invest in infrastructure projects. An emergent mechanism for such investment is the market in PPP equity. This is an aspect of PPPs that has to date had little empirical attention. This paper reports on the size and scope of the market in PPP equity sales within the UK. In the process, the nature of PPP projects and the existing rationales for the policy are critiqued. The paper concludes by laying out a number of potential research agendas focused on PPP equity sales including a call for reassessing theoretical perspectives

Industrial strategy and the UK regions: Sectorally narrow and spatially blind

The UK government's new Industrial Strategy could have a significant impact on the country's regions and localities. However, this has received little attention to date. The analysis presented here examines the existing location of the sectors targeted by the first phase of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and the location of the R&D laboratories likely to be first in line for funding. In focusing on an extremely narrow range of sectors, the Fund is likely to have limited impact on the UK's persistent regional inequalities. The activities eligible for support account for relatively little of manufacturing or the rest of the economy and the basis of this targeting and its potential distributional consequences are spatially blind. As such, it runs the risk of widening regional divides in prosperity

The outsourcing of social care in Britain : what does it mean for voluntary sector workers?

While recent decades have witnessed a growth in the outsourcing of public services in Britain, the post-1997 UK Labour governments have sought to put in place mechanisms aimed at encouraging long-term collaborative contracting relationships marked by less reliance on cost-based competition. This article explores empirically how far these mechanisms have achieved their aims and thereby acted to protect the employment conditions of staff, and links this exploration to debates concerning the employment implications of organizational reforms within public sectors internationally. It concludes that in terms of bringing income security to the voluntary sector and stability to employment terms and conditions these efforts have been unsuccessful, and consequently casts doubts on more optimistic interpretations of the employment effects of organizational restructuring in the British public sector

Forecasting substantial data revisions in the presence of model uncertainty

A recent revision to the preliminary measurement of GDP(E) growth for 2003Q2 caused considerable press attention, provoked a public enquiry and prompted a number of reforms to UK statistical reporting procedures. In this article, we compute the probability of 'substantial revisions' that are greater (in absolute value) than the controversial 2003 revision. The predictive densities are derived from Bayesian model averaging over a wide set of forecasting models including linear, structural break and regime-switching models with and without heteroscedasticity. Ignoring the nonlinearities and model uncertainty yields misleading predictives and obscures recent improvements in the quality of preliminary UK macroeconomic measurements