Recent developments in the EU single market suggest an increasing hostility towards labour market regulation

Can workers still fight for wage increases and the protection of their rights during times of economic crisis? The current mood of austerity in Europe means that this is becoming much more difficult. Yet, Anneliese Dodds argues that just as responses to the financial crisis are socially constructed rather than being ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’, the same applies to pressures on workers and capital to become more mobile and flexible; nothing should be taken for granted about the impact of the financial crisis on social and labour rights

Anneliese Dodds: the three core elements of a better, more integrated health and economic response to COVID-19

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds MP highlights three core elements that ought to underpin the UK’s response to COVID-19. These include an economic support package that goes hand in hand with public health restrictions; a greater degree of clarity over support for self-isolation; and a commitment to giving local authorities the resources they need to make relevant discretionary payments

Liberalization and the public sector:the pre-eminent role of governments in the ‘sale’ of higher education abroad

Much recent scholarship concerning liberalization has emphasized the role of regulatees, rather than governments, in promoting liberalization. This article examines such scholarship in the light of an important development in the British and French public sectors—the creation of new agencies (the Education Counselling Service and EduFrance) to ‘sell’ British and French higher education to potential international students. The new agencies attempted to induce two things: competition amongst higher education institutions for the recruitment of international students from developed and emerging economy countries, and the commodification of these students. This article shows that, contrary to existing theories of liberalization, governments were pre-eminent in pushing forward this liberalization, while higher education institutions attempted to hold it back

How does globalisation interact with higher education? The continuing lack of consensus:The continuing lack of consensus

This essay attempts to ascertain whether a particular meaning of globalisation, and view on its effects and the appropriate response to it, are becoming standardised across academia. To do so, it content-analyses a representative sample of new scholarship, mapping the various approaches of current researchers towards globalisation. The essay shows how globalisation remains a contested concept within studies of higher education, as in many other fields. Rather than globalisation being taken to refer unambiguously to global flows, pressures or trends, its meaning continues to depend on the particular perspective adopted by contemporary researchers. The same conflict is apparent concerning the impacts which are reputed to globalisation and with regard to the appropriate response to globalisation amongst academics and higher education institutions (HEIs) more generally. Perhaps the only apparent point of consensus amongst contemporary researchers is the claim that globalisation affects HEIs, rather than HEIs themselves being implicated in the promotion of globalisation. This position underplays the often important role of HEIs in encouraging cross-border flows and pressures, and global trends such as marketisation

Top-down or bottom-up: the real choice for public services

This article considers two contrasting approaches to reforming public services in order to meet the needs of people living in poverty. The first approach is top-down, involves categorising individuals (as 'hard to help', 'at risk', etc) and invokes scientific backing for justification. The second approach is bottom-up, emancipatory, relates to people as individuals and treats people who have experience of poverty and social exclusion as experts. The article examines each approach through providing brief examples in the fields of unemployment and parenting policy - two fields that have been central to theories of 'cycles of deprivation'. It is suggested here that the two approaches differ in terms of their scale, type of user involvement and type of evidence that is used for their legitimation. While the article suggests that direct comparison between the two approaches is difficult, it highlights the prevalence of top-down approaches towards services for people living in poverty, despite increasing support for bottom-up approaches in other policy areas

Liberalisation and the public sector: The case of international students' policy in Britain and France.

The spread of liberalisation across both developed and developing countries has become an increasingly important policy trend over the last thirty years. This thesis examines how liberalisation has occurred, at different speeds and in different ways, in the same sector across two different countries. It seeks to explain why, in the market for international students, liberalisation occurred to a greater extent in Britain than in France. This was despite the fact that both countries' governments had espoused very similar policies towards international students from 1979 onwards, promoting a reorientation of recruitment away from developing countries and towards developed and emerging economy countries, and encouraging higher education institutions (HEIs) to compete against each other for international students. The thesis attempts to explain this cross-national difference in the extent of liberalisation through examining which actors pushed for liberalisation, and which factors conditioned their ability to do so. In this case, governments played the most important role in propagating liberalisation, and higher education institutions generally attempted to resist liberalisation, rather than promoting it. Governments' ability to push forward liberalisation was constrained, however, by the extent of coordination of HEIs in sectoral associations, which enabled them to resist government proposals. Whilst in some cases, French governments were able to create new institutions which encouraged a commodification of international students, they proved unable to create new institutions which incentivised HEIs to compete against each other for the recruitment of international students. In contrast, British governments managed to create new institutions which led to both the commodification of international students, and competition for their recruitment. The thesis thus also counsels a more nuanced approach to liberalisation, which recognises that it can consist in different elements (in this case, in both commodification and competition). rather than representing a uniform, and unified, process across countries and sectors

The “child penalty” creates most of the gender earnings gaps in rich countries

After having children, women tend to change their working hours and wage rates, and even transition to new jobs. This phenomenon, known as the child penalty, explains the bulk of the gender earnings gap in developed countries. Myung Jin outlines key points raised by economists Camille Landais and Almudena Sevilla and Labour MP Anneliese Dodds during the “Women, work and economics” event hosted by the Centre for Economic Performance

Environmental governance in a contested state:the influence of European Union and other external actors on energy sector regulation in Kosovo

This article examines environmental governance in Kosovo, with a particular focus on the energy sector. The article considers the degree to which the emerging model of environmental governance is characterised by hierarchical and non-hierarchical modes of coordination. We examine the roles of a number of domestic institutions and actors – ministries, agencies, and regulatory bodies– and the influence of external actors, including the EU, the US, and Serbia. The EU is building Kosovo’s own hierarchical governance capacity by strengthening domestic institutions, whilst the US focuses primarily on market liberalization, whilst simultaneously supporting EU efforts. Moreover, environmental policy change is not wholly or predominantly driven by domestic actors, which can partly be attributed to Kosovo’s limited domestic sovereignty. We conclude that the emerging model of environmental governance in Kosovo is characterized by a weak hierarchy, partly as a result of external actor involvement, which disincentivises the government from responding to domestic non-state actor pressure