Both economic theory and evidence from the UK shows that state-funded healthcare which incorporates market-type incentives will save more lives and reduce more suffering

Commentary by Allyson Pollock et al misrepresents the findings of economic analyses of quasi-markets says Julian Le Grand. Looking at the evidence (and recognizing the defects of state agencies’ administration of healthcare) shows that quasi-markets with fixed prices perform better. Competitive mechanisms in the NHS were also supported by previous Labour reform

The energy transport by the propagation of sound waves in wave guides with a moving medium

The problem of the propagation of sound waves radiated by a source in a fluid moving with subsonic velocity between two parallel walls or inside a cylindrical tube is considered in [2], The most interesting thing of this problem is that waves may occur with constant amplitude coming from infinity. This article gives the calculation of the energy transport in the wave guides.\ud \ud It is shown that it is not possible to gain energy from infinity

Academia, policy and politics.

In October 2003, I started a secondment from the London School of Economics (LSE), where I hold the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy, to No 10 Downing Street, where I worked as a senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. I began working initially on a specific project: developing policies on extending user choice in public services, with particular reference to health care and education. Then I was asked to be the Prime Minister’s health policy adviser, a role I agreed to take on up to the general election that took place in May 2005. In the event I stayed on a few weeks after the election until August of that year, when I returned to LSE. So I worked for nearly two years in Downing Street. Mine was an unusual appointment. Most of my Downing Street colleagues were much younger than me; unlike me, all had had experience of working as political or policy advisers in government, despite their relative youth; and none were academics. Although interchange between government and academia is not uncommon in the United States, it is rare in the UK and other countries. So the editors of this journal felt that readers might be interested in my reflections on the experience, especially the differences between being an academic in a university and an academic in government: the squarish peg of academia in the round hole of politics and policy. Of course, the most obvious difference was in working style. As a senior academic at a good university, your time is broadly your own to allocate as you will – apart from the occasional lecture or seminar series, and even those you can usually re-arrange if necessary. But in government, as Harold Macmillan so famously noted, you are at the mercy of events. So often I would wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear about the latest outbreak of MRSA in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital or the mile-long queue of people waiting to register for a new NHS dentist, and know that the reflective paper the Prime Minister wanted on the pros and cons of more patient choice was going to have to be put off yet again. Rarely did days work out as planned; indeed, rarely did minutes work out as planned.

Knights, knaves or pawns? Human behaviour and social policy.

There are two fundamental changes currently under way in the welfare state. These are the development of quasi-markets in welfare provision, and the supplementation of ‘fiscal’ welfare by ‘legal’ welfare: policies that rely on redistributing income through regulation and other legal devices, instead of through the tax and social security system. This article argues that these changes are in part the result of a fundamental shift in policy-makers’ beliefs concerning human motivation and behaviour. People who finance, operate and use the welfare stateare no longer assumed to be either public spirited altruists (knights) or passive recipients of state largesse (pawns); instead they are all considered to be in one way or another self-interested (knaves). However, since neither the ‘new’ nor the ‘old’ set of assumptions are based on evidence, policies based on the new set are as likely to fail as those based on the old. What is needed are ‘robust’ policies that are not dependent on any simple view of human behaviour.

On-the-job training, firm resources and unemployment risks: an analysis of the Swedish recession 1991-1993

Two general questions are posed in this paper: (a) In what ways do characteristics of the firm where the worker is employed have an influence on the worker's risk to become unemployed? (b) How do general and specific skills acquired in the firm affect the worker's unemployment risk? The empirical analyses are based on three matched data sets: (i) survey data from the 1991 Swedish Level of Living Survey on individual and job related characteristics of the employees; (ii) register data on annual economic reports of private firms; and (iii) register data from the National Labor Market Board on registered unemployment. The main findings are: First, the resources and economic situation of the firm affect the workers' risks of becoming unemployed in several ways: The risks are larger for workers employed in small-scale firms, in labor intensive firms, in firms with small or negative profits, and/or in firms with a high debt to equity ratio. Moreover, these firm-level effects do not seem to be explained by the selection of productive, high capacity workers to resourceful, capital intensive and productive firms. Second, the effect on unemployment risks of the acquisition of skills within the firm is conditioned by the degree of transferability of such skills to other firms. A worker with skills that are firm specific will not be better off than a worker with relatively low job skills, while a worker with skills that can be of use with other employers has much less unemployment risks.Unemployment risks; firm

Iterative solution of a discrete axially symmetric potential problem

The Dirichlet problem for the axially symmetric potential equation in a cylindrical domain is discretized by means of a five-point difference approximation. The resulting difference equation is solved by point or line iterative methods. The rate of convergence of these methods is determined by the spectral radius of the underlying point or line Jacobi matrix. An asymptotic approximation for this spectral radius, valid for small mesh size, is derived

Outsider and Insider Expertise: The response of residents of deprived neighbourhoods to an academic definition of social exclusion

The aim of this paper is to compare academic interpretations of the term social exclusion with the understanding of people with direct experience of the phenomenon. A pre-selected group of residents of deprived neighbourhoods were asked about various aspects of the concept and their responses compared with the definitions of social exclusion used by Burchardt, Le Grand and Piachaud in their 1999 article in the journal Social Policy and Administration. In general, the residents' understanding of the term corresponded well with the more academic definitions; however, in one or two key areas there were significant differences, for example, the importance of neighbourhood and 'service poverty', and the need for action against aspects of social exclusion on the grounds of social justice. This confirms that it might be useful for more academic concepts to be tested against the views of those with experience of the phenomenon which the concept is trying to capture.definitions of social exclusion, community involvement, neighbourhood renewal

Too Risk Averse to Purchase Insurance? A Theoretical Glance at the Annuity Puzzle

This paper suggests a new explanation for the low level of annuitization, which is valid even if one assumes perfect markets. We show that, as soon there exists a positive bequest motive, sufficiently risk averse individuals should not purchase annuities. A model calibration accounting for temporal risk aversion generates a willingness-to-pay for annuities, which is significantly smaller than the one generated by a standard Yaari (1965) model. Moreover, the calibration predicts that riskless savings finances one third of consumption, in line with empirical findings.annuity puzzle, insurance demand, bequest, intergenerational transfers, temporal risk aversion, multiplicative preferences

Tax relief and partnership pensions

Government support of private (occupational and personal) pensions through tax relief is an important element in the UK’s retirement income system. However, the current tax relief system is regressive, lacks transparency and is difficult to control. This paper argues that it should be replaced by a cost-neutral matching-grant or tax-credit scheme. Such a scheme would embody the ‘partnership’ idea implicit in much government policy in this area, but would be much more progressive, more open and more accountable than existing arrangements. The argument is illustrated through a comparison of the cost and distributional impact of the current system with those of an alternative tax-credit scheme.