The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), established in 1938, is Britain's oldest independent economic research institute. The institute is a London-based independent UK registered charity that carries out academic research of relevance to business and policy makers, both nationally and internationally. The Institute receives no core funding from government or other sources. The bulk of funding comes from research projects awarded or commissioned by a variety of sources, all acknowledged in full in their published materials. The terms of their grants prohibit any involvement from funding bodies in determining or influencing content. Funders include government departments and agencies, the research councils, particularly the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), charitable foundations, the European Commission, and the private sector. The Institute are partners in two ESRC research centres (LLAKES, and the Centre for Macroeconomics), along with ESCoE, which is funded by the Office for National Statistics.
This paper argues that the civil economy tradition fuses ancient with new elements to provide a relational alternative to modern contractualist and utilitarian models of economic and political life. At its core is the idea of gift as reciprocity and gratuitousness, which grounds human sociability, the production of relational goods and the pursuit of the common good. Drawing on the work of Antonio Genovesi and the Neapolitan School, the paper shows how human happiness is inherently shared and linked to the good, understood as both immanent in social practices and transcendent in its divine origin. Genovesi’s Neo-Platonist civic humanism emphasizes reciprocity, public trust and virtue as the foundations of economic cooperation and political order. Against the modern separation of private interest from public welfare and market from society, the civil economy paradigm interprets market exchange as a form of gift-exchange embedded in social ties and intermediary institutions. It advances a covenantal conception of the polity as a plural and nested union of persons, groups and corporate bodies bound by shared ends rather than merely contractual arrangements. By re-embedding economic and political structures within relationships of mutual recognition and collective action, the civil economy tradition offers conceptual and practical resources for renewing civic life and fostering a more moral, cooperative market order, including practical proposals for institutional and policy transformation.
This paper develops a House Price-at-Risk framework to examine how housing subsidies, credit conditions, and supply factors influence the distribution of house price growth in Hungary. Using quantile regression with adaptive LASSO variable selection, we identify variables driving downside versus upside risks across multiple horizons. Financial stress dominates the lower tail at short horizons, while unemployment and affordability constraints become the primary drivers of downside risk at longer horizons. Housing subsidies exhibit pro-cyclical characteristics, concentrating significant positive effects on the upper quantiles while leaving the lower tail largely unaffected. Supply-side variables display horizon-dependent sign reversals, with construction permits exerting upward pressure on prices in the short run but moderating them as supply materialises. Uncertainty decomposition reveals persistent left-tail dominance across all horizons. These findings suggest that macroprudential frameworks should account for the distributional effects of housing subsidies, particularly their pro-cyclical influence on house price growth.
Abstract This article explores the barriers to dignified work that employers and policymakers (re)produce for Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in London, drawing from a participatory research project in which seven female community researchers interviewed 32 Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in London. Framed by theories on decent work and dignity in and at work, this article shows how employer practices can at times exclude Bangladeshi and Pakistani women from opportunities to develop social and human capital, reproduce intersectional forms of discrimination, and exacerbate the challenges created by women’s caring responsibilities at home and restrictive immigration policies. For the participants and community researchers, dignified work becomes accessible only when employers create inclusive workplace cultures and when cross-sector collaborations are formed to tackle systemic barriers both outside and within the workplace. The article concludes by emphasizing that any effort to foster the labour market inclusion of migrant and racially minoritized women requires shifting the focus to dignified work; targeting employers to create inclusive workplace cultures; and devising systemic solutions with women to ensure policies foster, rather than undermine, gender justice.
Abstract Drawing upon heterodox contributions that highlighted the impact of the global financial crisis and austerity on inequality, this paper builds on recent research about spatial and distributional dynamics to argue that the post-crisis approach of monetary expansion and fiscal contraction has exacerbated disparities both between and within regions as well as along the income distribution. Given the deep gaps in regional, human and social capital stocks, the paper also shows that the current approach to fiscal policy and public investment will not reduce inequalities. The fiscal framework and policy on public investment require fundamental reform if the UK government is to raise economic growth and living standards in every part of the UK.
