The UK’s external balance sheet – The international investment position

The paper describes the path of the UK's international investment position (IIP) with the rest of the world. The paper shows that both UK assets and liabilities grew considerably during the past decade. Liabilities always outstripped assets during this period, mainly reflecting the persistent current account deficits, which meant that the UK consistently ran a net liability position. Althoughthe size of the net liability position increased over the decade, its growth has been volatile. The paper presents a model which shows that in the long term flows had driven the changes to the UK’s net IIP, while the volatility in the short term was driven by other changes. The model showed that in 2008 exchange rate effects were the main driver of the UK’s improved net liability position; this wasbecause sterling depreciated sharply against all three major currencies. The deterioration in the net liability position in 2009 and 2010 was explained mainly in terms of price effects, as equity markets began to recover; but also exchange rate effects as sterling began to rally, particularly against the euro; and flows as investors turned to UK gilts in preference to euro denominated government debt

Why Do Foreign Firms Invest in South West England?

Regional Development Agencies compete to attract foreign direct investments (FDI) that generate economic benefits. This paper seeks to identify factors that attract FDI to the South West region of the UK. The results suggest that the South West’s average wage levels, population density, unemployment rate, physical infrastructure expenditure, growth and the relative dominance of the manufacturing sector all contribute to the multinational enterprise’s decision to locate to the South West. The amount of defence spending is also found to be a determinant, suggesting that the defence sector might be an attractor of FDI. These results are endorsed by a separate survey analysis.FDI; South West

South west regional economic profile

This ‘profile’ aims to provide a succinct analysis of South West England’s economy in a way that can be related to the objectives and priorities set out in the South West Regional Economic Strategy. It is written to inform all South West England partners working for the development of the regional economy

How similar are ONS’s monthly and annual business inquiries?

This article supports the Office for National Statistics’ monthly and annual surveys reconciliation programme. Itpresents an analysis of the coherence of business survey returns between the Monthly Inquiry into the Distributionand Service Sector (MIDSS) and Monthly Production Inquiry (MPI) compared with the Annual Business Inquiry. Atwo-stage methodology is employed: firstly, analysing the aggregate data and secondly, using microdata sets matchingindividual business responses from the monthly and annual surveys. This analysis is reported in terms of levels and growth rates for both an unadjusted and an adjusted MPI/MIDSS series

Why do foreign firms invest in south west England?

Regional Development Agencies compete to attract foreign direct investments (FDI) that generate economic benefits. This paper seeks to identify factors that attract FDI to the South West region of the UK. The results suggest that the South West’s average wage levels, population density, unemployment rate, physical infrastructure expenditure, growth and the relative dominance of the manufacturing sector all contribute to the multinational enterprise’s decision to locate to the South West. The amount of defence spending is also found to be a determinant, suggesting that the defence sector might be an attractor of FDI. These results are endorsed by a separate survey analysis

Understanding official data sources: Final report for the low pay commission

The paper is split into three main sections: a review of existing data sources; an analysis of characteristics of the main reference datasets used for the production of research and official statistics; and an investigation into the imputation code used by the LPC to produce official statistics.The finding of the review of ASHE, LFS and BHPS is that the notion of rounding in wage setting and wage reporting is confirmed, and the sources of that rounding detailed. For employers, one suggestion is that rounding wages is a response to administrative burdens. For employees, rounding in survey reponses is largely unrelated to any characteristics of the respondent; this means that, although the LFS is clearly subject to measurement error, it can be assumed to be random for many statistical purposes. The report recommends that LPC should focus its attention on occupational differences in wages rather than industrial sector. On imputation, the study reviewed the current LPC code for addressing gaps in the data available for describing subsections of the community. The study found that while the code has a number of problems, the alternatives (no imputation, or using an alternative wage measure) seemed to less justified statistically. The report recommends that the LPC review and rewrite the code

Measuring non-compliance with minimum wages

Many countries have a statutory minimum wage for employees. There is a strong policy interest in knowing the degree of compliance with the law. Quantitative analysis is ideally suited to this, and many countries have rich datasets for employment research. However, identifying genuine underpayment of wages is not straightforward: data quality, statistical factors and processing errors can all contribute to the under- or over-estimation of the true level of compliance. The impact is exacerbated by the binary ‘yes-no’ nature of compliance.We consider the statistical measurement of non-compliance in the UK. UK minimum wages have been extensively studied, using large-scale high-quality datasets whose characteristics are well understood and whose overlapping coverage allows triangulation of results. We focus particularly on apprentices: a survey of apprentice wages was introduced in 2011, throwing further light onmeasurement issues, even in a purpose-built survey instrument.We identify several problems leading to under- and over-estimation of compliance rates. Some are well-known statistical or methodological issues, but others relate to the way that survey data is processed; this is rarely considered by data users. The binary nature of compliance makes such problems easier to identify and evaluate. In particular, we demonstrate the value of a very detailed knowledge of the data at crucial points in the distribution, and the importance of triangulation for understanding the reliability of estimates.While concentrating on compliance with a statutory minimum wage, the paper has some wider lessons for the understanding the characteristics of large and complex datasets. We also show how the use of quantitative data can be used to effectively target complementary qualitative datacollection

Using the ‘five safes’ to structure economic evaluations of data governance

The ‘five safes’ is a popular data governance framework. It is used to design and critique data management strategies across the world, and has also been used as a performance framework to measure the effectiveness of data access operations. We report on a novel application of the five safes framework: to structure economic evaluation of data governance.As the world has become more digitally-dependent, questions of data governance such as ethics, institutional arrangements and statistical protection measures have increased in significance. Understanding the economic contribution of investments in data sharing and data governance is highly problematic: outputs and outcomes are often widely dispersed and hard to measure, and value of those investments is very context-dependent.The Five Safes was designed to allow structured investigation into data governance. Combining this with more traditional logic models can provide an evaluation methodology which is practical, reproducible and comparable. We illustrate this by considering the application of the combined logic model-Five Safes framework to agronomy investments in Ethiopia. We demonstrate how the Five Safes was used to generate the necessary context for a more traditional quantitative study, and consider lessons learned for the wider evaluation of data and data governance investments

Measuring the value of improving data governance and access in Gates Foundation programme: A case study of the Supporting Soil Health Interventions in Ethiopia projects

The Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) and the Open Data Institute (ODI) commissioned a team of economists to measure the value of improving data governance and access in the Supporting Soil Health Interventions in Ethiopia (SSHIiE). In order to do so, the study applied two separate but interlinked models to create a new framework. For the first time, the Five Safes model was adapted to be used in a qualitative assessment of value. These results informed the development of an innovative quantitative framework, applied to a traditional cost-benefit analysis (CBA) methodology. By combining the quantitative and qualitative framework, the study demonstrated that it is possible to generate plausible and credible quantitative estimates of both costs and benefits of data governance and access. While acknowledging that the estimates are only illustrative, the case study results suggested on a direct cost measure, the SSHIiE data governance activities yielded a negative return; but they also show that relatively few ‘indirect’ benefits (current but unmeasured, or measurable but in the future) are necessary to reverse that view, at least from the point of the economy more generally. This is the full project report