Category: Global Economy

Free papers, reports, et al. Vol.5

Here are @_WorldSolutions’ RTs which include free papers, reports, podcasts, video, et al.


Free papers, reports, et al. Vol.4

Here are @_WorldSolutions’ RTs from late December to mid November 2016 which include free papers, reports, podcasts, video, et al.


Free papers, reports, et al. Vol.3

Here are @_WorldSolutions’ RTs from late January 2017 to late December 2016 which include free papers, reports, podcast, et al.


Free papers, reports, et al. Vol.2

Here are @_WorldSolutions’ RTs from February to late January 2017 which include free papers, reports, podcast, et al.


Free papers, reports, et al. Vol.1

Here are @_WorldSolutions’ recent RTs which include free PDFs of papers, reports, et al.


Africa Vol.6 (South Africa)

cf. An economy for the 99% | @Nina_Kirsten @KPMG_SA   UK and South Africa Relations post Brexit (w Video; 3/13/2017) | @MatterConcern (@SABCNewsOnline interview with the outgoing British High Commissioner to South Africa)

SouthAfrica_WorldSolutions


US Policy Changes Vol.63 (Deregulation/Reform/Inequality Vol.7)

Here are articles on inequality, financial reform, tax, et al. Excerpts are on our own.

America on the Brink of Oligarchy (8/23/2012) | Paul Starr (@WilsonSchool) @NewRepublic
– The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy
By Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady (Princeton University Press, 693 pp.)
– Oligarchy
By Jeffrey A. Winters (Cambridge University Press, 323 pp.)
– The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy
By David Karpf (Oxford University Press, 237 pp.)
… Americans in the top fifth in socioeconomic status (a combined measure of income and education) are “roughly twice as likely to go to the polls as those in the bottom quintile” but about eight times more likely to make a political donation. …
… In research cited by Schlozman and her co-authors, Martin Gilens of Princeton University analyzed nearly two thousand questions in public-opinion surveys about proposed national policies from 1981 to 2002. On issues where opinion varied by income, he found that the policies finally adopted were strongly related to the preferences of upper-income people, and not at all to what the poor or even middle-income Americans wanted.
…twelve thousand organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directory. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, only a small proportion of groups represented in Washington (12 percent) are associations made up of individuals. The majority are corporations, governmental bodies, and associations of institutions. By sheer numbers, “representation of business is dominant.” In contrast, most workers who are neither professionals nor managers have no group in Washington representing their occupational interests, unless they are unionized—and only 7 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized.
…The Unheavenly Chorus estimates that union members accounted for 25 percent of political activity in 1967 but for only 18 percent in 1990, and for just 11 percent in 2006. Meanwhile, corporations and the wealthy have been busily converting “market resources into political advocacy.”
… When C. Wright Mills wrote about “the power elite” in the 1950s, he was specifically referring to decision-makers at the pinnacle of corporate, military, and civilian bureaucracies. Winters rejects elite theory as a “detour,” and reaches back to an older tradition of thought stressing the distinctive role of wealth as a foundation of power. He traces his theory of oligarchy to Aristotle (“whenever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy”) and to Machiavelli, who was concerned with the means by which a republic could limit the power of wealth. …
… If a Michael Bloomberg decides to run for office, Winters points out, it is not because he is trying to keep his wealth safe from rivals or necessarily to advance his material interests. In a civil oligarchy, rather than seeking out the spotlight, the superrich can use their money to exert political influence, and they can hire the busy “worker bees” of what Winters calls the “Income Defense Industry,” including banks, investment advisors, and law and accounting firms. …particularly to the creation of tax shelters so costly that they are available only to the ultra-rich. …oligarchs have an interest in pushing tax obligations down to the mass affluent through a lower threshold for the highest tax bracket, which deflects some of the burden and may win the super-rich more allies in opposing higher marginal rates.
…the “lion’s share” of recent gains in income and wealth have gone “to a sliver of the population,” the top “1/10th and even 1/100th of the top 1 percent of households.” If political participation were the key, economic gains should at least have been diffused more widely among the mass affluent. …market-generated returns have also diverged because of changes in technology and the global economy, and although aggressively egalitarian policies might have limited the breakaway gains at the top, those policies were blocked by a conservative ideological resurgence that cannot be reduced to the influence of big money.
… Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation pays a tax rate of only 9.8 percent (compared with the statutory rate of 35 percent), because 90 percent of its earnings come from hotels and casinos in Singapore and Macao. Obama has proposed ending the deductions and credits that enable Sands to shelter billions in revenue from taxes. Adelson is also facing a Justice Department investigation of potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in his Macao dealings. Another big GOP donor, the Texas financier Harold Simmons, has used political contributions to win favorable legislation in his own and other states advancing his nuclear-waste business…
…David Karpf’s The MoveOn Effect… …@dailykos @DFAaction @BoldProgressive…
… In recent decades, while conservatives developed into a strong and cohesive political force, the rise of specialized, issue-based progressive advocacy led to a proliferation of separate agendas. So the rise of politically oriented “issue generalists” on the liberal side is a welcome development. In addition, the new groups are cheap to run, and they easily scale up to large dimensions.
…to suggest that the Internet is a “weapon of the strong” is to miss a crucial point: online organization does not depend on patronage by the wealthy. The new low-cost methods of organizing are especially important at a time when one of the central threats to American democracy is the entrenchment of oligarchic power. …

A Wasted Crisis?: Why the Democrats did so little to change Wall Street (7/12/2013) | Paul Starr (@WilsonSchool) @NewRepublic
…political changes have undermined whatever dignity and respect members of Congress once had. …
… But financial reform posed a difficult test for several reasons—the political power of the industry, the complexity of the issues, and the complicity of leading Democrats in the policies that helped to bring about the crisis.
…@OpenSecretsDC, which tracks political donations, “the financial sector is far and away the largest source of campaign contributions to federal candidates and parties.” Thanks in part to federal policy, finance has become the dominant sector of the economy, increasing its share of total domestic profits from 15 percent in the early 1980s to 41 percent in the early 2000s. The financialization of the economy promotes the financialization of politics, as money finds its way to power. …
… The ultimate basis of finance’s power is structural: if governments adopt policies that genuinely threaten financial markets, capital will migrate elsewhere, credit will tighten, and economic growth will suffer. But the more complicated the markets become, the more difficult it is to know where the danger point lies. Complexity amplifies the industry’s influence in discussions about alternatives, because its CEOs and lobbyists can make inflated claims of perilous repercussions from change that legislators do not know enough to discount. …
… Removing those barriers did exactly the opposite. …Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut…
… Robert Kaiser’s Act of Congress is a step-by-step, journalistic narrative of the legislative process from the eruption of the financial crisis in September 2008 through the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010. In Kaiser’s telling, Congress overcame special-interest pressures and partisan obstruction, worked through complex issues, and enacted substantial and intelligent legislation. In stark contrast, Jeff Connaughton’s The Payoff is a burn-all-bridges memoir of a longtime lobbyist who became a top aide to a liberal Democratic senator and says that Dodd-Frank was shot through with holes as a result of special-interest pressures and the connivance of both Dodd and the administration. And in the most weighty and analytical of the books, Political Bubbles, the political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal argue that 2008 was a “wasted crisis” because American democracy failed not only in the run-up to the bailouts, but also in the aftermath. Dodd-Frank, they say, exemplifies a long historical pattern (except for the New Deal) of weak and often counterproductive governmental responses to breakdowns in the financial system.
… Frank and Dodd shared…the practical wisdom required to get things done. …
“Dodd’s personal attributes were even more important,” Kaiser writes. Not as brilliant as Frank but “bright enough,” Dodd was popular with other senators and shrewd in dealing with them, always looking for ways to address the “substantive concerns of his colleagues, especially Republicans.” In a memorable episode…
… Frank agreed to two concessions: a limit on the supervisory authority of the new agency that the law would establish to protect consumers, and a change in the formula for assessments paid to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which would shift more than $1 billion in annual fees from the community banks to the big banks. Wall Street would not like it, but by peeling off the hometown banks, Frank reduced local pressure on the Blue Dogs and other representatives to oppose the bill.
… Social scientists distinguish among three dimensions of power. Who wins and who loses in overt conflict is only the first dimension. The second dimension is control, often implicit, over what gets on the agenda and the issues and alternatives that never even come up for discussion. The third dimension involves the terms of debate, the ways of thinking about problems. …
… The industry opposed the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created under the law as well as other provisions, such as a watered-down version of the Volcker Rule…
…Jeff Connaughton…
… Dodd, whom Connaughton describes as “Machiavellian,” readily made concessions to Republicans who were not going to vote for the bill, while ignoring his own Democratic colleagues. …
In Political Bubbles, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal… “We favor a strong set of simple rules rather than regulatory discretion,” they write. “The thirty-seven pages of Glass-Steagall are much to be preferred to the nearly three thousand pages of Dodd-Frank.”…
… “Washington rushed to bail out the commercial and investment banks and American International Group (AIG), but did little to relieve small debtors” and Congress passed Dodd-Frank, which “leaves ample opportunities for future bubbles.”
… Institutionally, the key development has been the increased use of the filibuster in the Senate. Together, the growth in ideological polarization in Congress and the exploitation of institutional choke points have led to gridlock, blocking legislative adjustment of policies as conditions change. And in the case of finance, that failure to update policy has effectively meant deregulation, because of the creation in recent decades of new financial products not envisioned under the New Deal regulatory regime. …
…a consumer coalition in 2009 announced it would raise $5 million to support financial reform; in comparison, the lobbying expenditures by the finance industry in 2009 and 2010 totaled around $750 million.
… Dodd-Frank’s establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the ACA’s insurance reforms and expansion of coverage. As a result of those provisions, I wouldn’t say that Dodd-Frank was a “waste” of a crisis or that the ACA was a mistake—but both laws leave key interests undisturbed and therefore do not deal with critical problems in either finance or health care. …
Yet the battles over financial reform and health care differed in at least one way. Financial reform never had the public’s attention the way health care did. According to McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, “it was not because the public was divided, even along partisan lines, over the causes of the crisis or the need to reregulate the financial services industry.” In their view, skepticism about government’s ability to restrain Wall Street and confusion about what ought to be done dampened public engagement.
… During the debate over Dodd-Frank, neither Obama nor congressional leaders even tried to arouse public concern about Wall Street and build support for a stronger bill. Ironically, anger over Wall Street and the bailouts found its expression in the Tea Party in 2010. …
… Connaughton’s memoir is a reminder about such deceptions as Goldman Sachs’s sale of derivatives to customers who didn’t know that those derivatives had been designed to go bust, and Lehman’s shift of liabilities off its balance sheets before it went broke, and the tower of speculation built on liar loans and other subprime mortgages. Millions of people have lost their homes, whole communities have been devastated, but somehow the government does not have the ability or the will to prosecute the executives…
… The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig… …the debts of the five biggest banks in the United States as of March 2012 totaled $8 trillion, a figure that they say would have been higher under European accounting standards. …

What Is Hillary Clinton’s Agenda?: She’s had so much to say on so many issues that voters may not know what she wants to accomplish. (6/20/2016) | Paul Starr (@WilsonSchool) @theprospect
… In 2010, congressional Democrats and the president prevented the extension of the tax cuts for the rich enacted under George W. Bush, increasing the top marginal income tax rate back to its level during the Clinton administration (39.6 percent) and reducing tax cuts on investment income and estates. When these changes went into effect in 2013, the top 0.1 percent paid $50 billion in taxes more than they would have paid under the previous rules. Partly as a result of a provision in the ACA, the tax rate on capital gains has gone from 15 percent to 23.8 percent. …


US Policy Changes Vol.45 (Foreign Policy Vol.7 – globalization)

Here is an article on globalization: WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION?: Four Possible Answers (PDF; Dec 1998) | Simon Reich @KelloggInst @NotreDame. Excerpts are on our own.

Introduction
… Structuralism, with its rationalist underpinnings, came under attack in political science from constructivists, and within a short period no professional conference or symposium was complete without a genuflection towards the attributes of ‘globalization. …
…finance, technology transfer, transnationalism, multilateralism, and regionalism…
…globalization signaled the reduced importance of (at least traditional forms of) security studies in international relations and a corresponding elevation of international political economy questions—as well as suggesting new linkages between OECD and non-OECD states, the private and public sectors, capital and labor, work and leisure, state and society. …globalization explains the Clinton Administration’s preference for focusing on economic issues in foreign affairs, the causal linkage between this apparently global phenomenon and current policy remains elusive. …

Definition
James Rosenau… Globalization is not the same as globalism, which points to aspirations for an end state of affairs wherein values are shared by or pertinent to all the world’s five billion people, their environment, their roles as citizens, consumers or producers with an interest in collective action designed to solve common problems. Nor is it universalism—values which embrace all humanity, hypothetically or actually.
Anthony McGrew… …multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation states (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system. It defines a process through which events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can come to have a significant consequence for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the globe.
Philip Cerny… Globalization is defined here as a set of economic and political structures and processes deriving from the changing character of the goods and assets that comprise the base of the international political economy—in particular, the increasing structural differentiation of those goods and assets.

1. Globalization as a Historical Epoch
… The demise of the Cold War coincided with the onset of globalization, raising the question of whether there is a causal relationship between the two. Certainly, the comments of scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein (echoing Trotsky), who registered concern that Communist states could not sustain themselves in the context of a capitalist system, may be interpreted to imply as such. Whether causally related or not, globalization as a period might be said to ‘succeed’ the Cold War historically. …
… The first was the introduction of détente between the United States and Soviet Union. The second was the breakdown of the ‘Social Contract,’ initially in Britain but eventually throughout the advanced industrial countries. …

2. Globalization as Confluence of Economic Phenomena
… Linking globalization to processes of economic integration, Robert Z. Lawrence, for example, makes the broad statement that “economic integration generally leads to convergence, with poorer economies growing more rapidly than richer economies.” Jeffrey G. Williamson, noted Harvard economist and then President of the of the Economic History Association, also argued in his presidential address that globalization leads to convergence—and has done in prior historical periods. …
… R.J. Barry Jones who suggests that globalization may simply be an intensification of the process
of international interdependence…
… Wilfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder are specific in their characterization of globalization, associating it with increased international capital mobility and a growing incidence of mergers and acquisitions and of strategic alliances. …

3. Globalization as the hegemony of American values
… Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of A Backward Society or David Apter’s comment, in describing the theme of the Politics of Modernization, that “Despite an emphasis on methods of comparing governments and studying
their political growth and adaptation, analysis begins with moral content. …
Francis Fukuyama suggests that convergence is inevitable:… All countries undergoing economic modernization must increasing resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens… Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism…
… Protestant values that purportedly epitomize the Enlightenment. Even Samuel Huntington, noted critic of the initial formulations of modernization theory (and explicit opponent of the concept of convergence), appears to have accepted a central proposition of modernization; the stimulant of economic growth on the propensity towards democratization. …
… But it is a specific form of liberal democracy—it is John Locke’s and not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s variant. And it is, comparably, a particular form of economic development—it is the Anglo-Saxon classicism of Adam Smith rather than the ‘Continentalism’ of Friedrich List. …
… The effort to co-op elites, at least initially from across the Triad of Japan, North America, and Europe, has effectively defended the stability of a liberal international order and warded off any movement towards mercantilism, averting an imperialist crisis of capitalism anticipated by a Leninist approach. Here, Gramsci’s stress on hegemony’s reliance on consensuality rather than domination is critical in explaining the emergence of a transnational class structure which is buttressed by a substructure predicated on the free movement of capital. While American power in a realist sense may have therefore declined, the capacity of organic intellectuals like those found in organizations such as the Trilateral Commission has proven indispensable in exporting a universalist ideology (of neoliberalism), thus constructing a historic bloc and thereby sustaining America hegemony.
… For liberals it often disintegrates as part of this change in ‘zeitgeist.’ …
… Ann Marie Slaughter concurs: A new world order is emerging, with less fanfare but more substance than either the liberal internationalist or new medievalist visions. The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These parts—courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures—are networking with their counterparts abroad, creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order… Transgovernmentalism offers its own world order ideal, less dramatic but more compelling than either liberal internationalism or the new medievalism. It harnesses the state’s power to find and implement solutions to global problems.

4. Globalization as Technological and Social Revolution
…of globally integrated production; of specialized but interdependent labor markets; of the rapid privatization of state assets; and of the inextricable linkage of technology across conventional national borders. …
The notion that glocalization is the localization of economic and political relations, shifting authority from the national level downward in a manner that enhances responses to globalization, conflicts with alternatives views that suggests the two are dialectically opposed. …
… Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder … globalizing firms pursue a strategy that strives for a worldwide intrafirm division of labor while glocalizing firms pursue an alternative strategy in which they seek to replicate production within a number of regions, thereby avoiding the risk associated with the formation of trade blocs. Glocalizing firms therefore seek to generate a geographically concentrated interfirm division of labor.
… Consistent with this distinction, the two behave in very different ways. Multinational firms may decentralize production and sales but their decision-making remains firmly centralized in a hierarchical structure. This, in behavioral terms, is reflected in their propensity to retain the overwhelming majority of R&D facilities at home, with very few exceptions.
…Ohmae… As private sector managers and government policymakers are discovering, it makes no sense in so borderless a world to think, say, of countries like ‘Italy’ or ‘China’ as discrete economic entities. …
…that of a paradigmatic shift in the sociological relations that are the foundation for relations among state, economy, and civil society. …
… Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden who offer the prospect of four decades of sustained growth and ‘remarkable transformation,’ stimulated by the ‘big bang’ of technological development (computers, telecom, biotech, nanotech, and alternative energy) and deregulation. … An unprecedented alignment of an ascendant Asia, a revitalized America, and a reintegrated greater Europe—including a recovered Russia—together will create an economic juggernaut that pulls along most other regions of the planet. These two metatrends—fundamental technological change and a new ethos of openness—will transform our world into the beginnings of a global civilization. …

Conclusion
…four distinct approaches; the first being historical, the second economic, the third sociological, and the fourth technological. …

cf. Review “Good-Bye Hegemony! Power and Influence in the Global System (2014) by Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow” | G. John Ikenberry
Reich and Lebow have joined a long list of writers who have announced the end of U.S. hegemony and the coming of the next world order. In fact, they argue that hegemony has been dead for many decades. “Hegemony is a fiction propagated to support a large defense establishment, justify American claims to world leadership, and buttress the self-esteem of voters,” they proclaim. But they have an odd notion of what constitutes hegemony, which they equate with “the blunt exercise of force.” Reich and Lebow note that influence is far more important than raw power and identify three functions that leading states must perform to sustain order in today’s allegedly post-hegemonic international system: agenda setting (advocating policies and principles of order), custodianship (stabilizing the world economy), and sponsorship (initiating rules and institutions). These are perfectly good points, but the main critique relies on a straw man: political scientists and policymakers are well aware of the distinction between raw power and influence. Indeed, the field of international relations even has a term for the strategy of influence that Reich and Lebow advocate. That term is “hegemony.”


US Policy Changes Vol.37 (Trade Vol.5 – Metro areas, Currency exchanges, Globalization)

Here are @BrookingsInst’s articles on trade, metro areas, currency and globalization. Excerpts are on our own.

Americans most affected by trade voted for Trump (12/14/2016) | @joeparilla and @MarkMuro1 @BrookingsMetro
… Economic theory acknowledges that global trade offers benefits that should be celebrated and exacts costs that cannot be ignored. As the Council on Foreign Relation’s Edward Alden details in a new book, this reality led to the creation of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) in 1962. …
brookingsinst-tradedisplacement
The program’s Consolidated Petitions Database, which has been geocoded and provided online by Public Citizen, offers an estimate of the number of workers at trade-affected companies, including both layoffs and employment reductions through attrition. …
… Since 1994, the top 10 metro areas in terms of total TAA-certified workers include the largest metros in the country — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Boston. Also in the top 10 are export-intensive midsized metros like Detroit, Charlotte, and Portland. El Paso — on the U.S.–Mexico border — rounds out the top 10. Small metro areas—those with populations between 50,000 and 500,000—house 21 percent of TAA-certified workers while micropolitan areas (those with populations under 50,000 residents with a core city of at least 10,000) and rural areas account for a combined 29 percent of TAA-certified workers.
… the most intense effect of trade displacement is in smaller communities in the Midwest and South… …the Carolinas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and parts of Ohio and Michigan that depend on manufacturing industries that are subject to global competition and technological automation (Map 1). …
Yet business as usual will not suffice. The TAA program, as it is currently deployed, has not been particularly effective in helping displaced workers. Its scale is insufficient relative to the scale of displacement. Indeed, MIT’s David Autor and colleagues find that most displaced workers rely on Social Security and disability benefits rather than the retraining resources provided by TAA. …

Rise in dollar shows short-term support of Trump’s pro-business platform (12/7/2016) | Barry P. Bosworth @thehill @BrookingsEcon
… However, it is also important to view these changes from a longer-term perspective where the value of the dollar has been steadily appreciating for the past five years – 30 percent since early 2011. During that period the United States has been a lone bright spot in the global economy.
With unemployment below the historic norm, record levels of corporate profits, and the Federal Reserve now poised to raise interest rates, financial capital is being redirected to dollar-denominated assets. It is the judgment of global investors that the United States has completed its long recovery from the financial crisis and is on the verge of a return to normality. …
… On the other hand, for those who are employed in export-based jobs, the high cost of American-made goods will tend to drive down exports and increase the pressures to produce abroad.
Second, for comparisons with trade, it is important to focus on real, or inflation-adjusted, values since, for many countries, the change in the nominal exchange rate is simply an offset to relatively high rates of domestic inflation. …
… Most recent studies of U.S. trade suggest a lag response stretching over 2-3 years.
Those studies also typically conclude that a 10 percent appreciation of the dollar would lead to a long-run increase in the U.S. trade deficit by about 1 percent of GDP. Thus, we should anticipate that a continued strong dollar should exert a drag on the U.S. economy as a widening of the trade deficit from the current 3 percent of GDP to about 4 percent in the next 1-2 years.
… At present, the strong dollar reflects investors’ relative optimism about their prospective returns on dollar-denominated assets, and not a precursor of a deteriorating trade performance. …

Donald Trump and the future of globalization (11/18/2016) | @BrinaSeidel and @laurencechandy @BrookingsInst
Figure 1: Globalization trends, 1870-2015
Figure 2: Global shares of trade, capital markets, and migration
We may see countries retaliate against U.S. protectionist policies. … The threat has already been made explicit by the state-sponsored Chinese tabloid, Global Times, which proposed that China respond to aggressive trade policies by cancelling contracts with U.S. suppliers…and by…Nicolas Sarkozy who has suggested that the Europe Union impose a tax on U.S. products and limit the participation of foreign companies in EU public contracts if Trump withdraws from the Paris climate accord.
… In the past week, politicians from Italy, Hungary, Greece, and elsewhere have invoked Trump’s victory as justification for policies that reverse the pattern of globalization.
Alternatively, countries may repudiate global norms and institutions that underpin the globalized economy, if they feel that the U.S. is no longer committed to upholding the liberal economic order. …

Is globalization’s second wave about to break? (w PDF; 10/4/2016) | @BrinaSeidel and @laurencechandy @BrookingsInst
… Globalization’s first wave, which lasted from 1870 to 1914, is viewed today as the embodiment of the liberal open economic paradigm. … For instance, around half of all British savings were channeled abroad over this period, while half of Argentina’s entire capital stock was foreign owned by 1914. …
… The passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff act in the U.S. against the backdrop of the Great Depression set off a retaliatory backlash among the world’s major economies that crippled global trade. …
The essence of globalization is the movement of goods, money, and people across international borders. …Figure 1
We find that, while the process of economic integration has slowed, there is only limited evidence so far of an absolute decline. In addition, today’s level of integration matches or exceeds the heights of globalization’s first wave. This could equally imply that globalization has reached unsustainable levels or that no such levels exist.
… First, one of our three series (goods) is a measure of flows, whereas the other two (money and people) are measures of stocks. … Second, our series for goods and money are expressed in terms that differ from contemporary measures cited in economic reports and the media. …
GOODS
… At the end of the first wave of globalization in 1913, merchandise exports peaked at 7.9 percent of global GDP. That peak was surpassed as early as 1970, when tariff reductions under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were still at an early stage, the standardization of shipping containers was being established, and the rise of export manufactures from the developing world had yet to occur. Goods exports have since been propelled to far greater heights, reaching 19.7 percent of global income in 2008.
That share stood at 15.1 percent in 2015, having declined continuously for the previous four years. …
The recent slump in trade growth… Both cyclical and structural factors are at work. The latter include the exhaustion of gains from both the incorporation of previously-closed economies into global markets and the fragmentation of value chains across borders—commonly referred to as the second unbundling. …
… While trade in services is considerably smaller than trade in goods, its value as a share of global GDP has doubled in the past 30 years and has proved more resilient during the recent trade slowdown… Figure 2
…the trend towards creeping protectionism using non-tariff barriers. … This risk is real, but for now remains speculative. …
MONEY
… Contemporary annual estimates from 1990 onward are built at the country level from independent estimates of external debt, foreign direct investment (FDI), and portfolio equity stocks. …
Four caveats are immediately worth noting. …
During the first wave of globalization, the developing world’s foreign capital stock peaked at 32.4 percent of GDP in 1914. … Despite falling precipitously during the Great Recession…30.1 percent, is at its highest level in a century. …
FDI’s rise is a defining component of globalization’s second wave and is synonymous with the growing role of international finance beyond traditional areas such as railways and extractive industries into new sectors including commerce and industry.
…the foreign-held portfolio stock as a share of low-income country GDP remains negligible at only 0.4 percent in 2014. …
…debt relief, and the nurturing of domestic debt markets through the issuance of debt denominated in domestic currency and the encouragement of purchases by local financial institutions. …
Concerns about the de-globalization of foreign capital since the Great Recession have centered on a different phenomenon: the reduction in inter-bank lending. …
Figure 3
MIGRATION
… Flows—as opposed to stocks—of long-distance migration along certain routes are well documented from ports and customs statistics. Other routes, especially those overland, are not formally recorded. Accounts of short-distance migration are missing altogether for most of the world. …
… Our benchmark for age at migration is the median age at entry of migrants to the U.S. each year, drawn from official U.S. records. Our benchmark for migrant’s life expectancy is U.S. life expectancy for the respective age, gender, and year of U.S. migrants, obtained again from U.S. records, and discounted by the ratio of U.S. life expectancy at birth to global life expectancy at birth. …
… At the end of globalization’s first wave in 2015, the global migrant stock is estimated to have peaked at 2.5 percent of the global population, although it stayed close to this level into the 1930s before beginning its descent. The share began to climb again in the 1970s and surpassed its previous peak for the first time in 1988. It rose further in the 2000s and today stands at 3.3 percent. …
The U.S. migrant stock hovered at close to 14 percent of its population throughout globalization’s first wave before falling precipitously. That share has rebounded since 1970 and in 2015 stands a fraction short of its historical high at 13 percent. …
Figure 4
…both the absolute number and global share of migration flows has remained relatively stable in the past two decades. …a lower age of migration, longer life expectancy for migrants, and/or lower return rates. …
CONCLUSION
Table 1: Benchmarking globalization across two waves
… The past two decades have been described as an era of hyper-globalization during which both the level and rate of global integration was judged as having intensified. Based on our analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that this period is over. … Our speculative assessment is that the coming years will be characterized either by stabilization in the level of globalization, or further growth in the degree of integration but at a more modest pace than in the past.

The case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (10/4/2016) | @solis_msolis @BrookingsFP


Indexes Vol.4 (The Global Competitiveness Index 2016-2017 – methodology, et al.)

Here are our excerpts concerning #GCI methodology, et al. of @wef’s The Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017 (w PDF).

PDF
CHAPTER 1.1 Competitiveness Agendas to Reignite Growth: Findings from the Global Competitiveness Index p5-11
Monetary policy is not enough: Insufficient competitiveness is a constraint for reigniting growth worldwide
… Figure 2 shows how economies that perform poorly in the GCI have seen their central banks boost their balance sheets more than better-performing economies, and yet those with higher competitiveness have recovered faster from the financial crisis and ensuing recession, achieving faster growth rates. The fact that monetary stimulus has been more effective and growth has been higher in more competitive economies, regardless of fiscal policies followed, suggests that the constraints may be on the supply side. Improving the conditions for businesses to flourish and increase their productivity is therefore the main policy challenge for advanced and emerging economies alike.
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At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution era, technology and innovation are increasingly driving development
… Innovation and business sophistication are more closely associated with income levels in general, and in emerging economies and commodity-exporting economies in particular, than they used to be. Figure 3 shows how, since 2010, for these two groups, GDP per capita has become more closely correlated with the GCI’s technological readiness, business sophistication, and innovation pillars than it is with the infrastructure, health and primary education, and market-related pillars (goods markets efficiency, financial market development, and labor market efficiency). These results illustrate how sources of productivity within firms and production units that are related to their ability to incorporate new technologies into their production processes, and that change the ways in which those firms and units perform tasks, are playing a larger role than investment in basic physical and human capital and well-functioning factor and goods markets, frequently thought to be sufficient to reignite growth. It also shows how the price changes experienced since the end of the commodity cycle and faster technological change are creating incentives for firms and policymakers to engage in more innovative activities.
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Declining openness is endangering future growth and prosperity
An open, trading economy generates incentives to innovate and invest in new technologies because firms are exposed to competition and new ideas and can benefit from the technology transfer that comes from mports and foreign investment. … protectionist measures, especially non-tariff barriers, have increased and global trade has not recovered since the global trade slowdown following the financial crisis. Figure 4 illustrates that, according to GCI data, economies in all income groups have become less open since 2007, driven mainly by non-tariff barriers, including increased legal and normative requirements. Figure 5 shows that economies that are open to foreign competition (as measured by the foreign competition subpillar of the GCI) are also more innovative, suggesting the importance of openness for innovation. …

Appendix A: Methodology and Computation of the Global Competitiveness Index 2016–2017 p35-37
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1st pillar: Institutions
The institutional environment of a country depends on the efficiency and the behavior of both public and private stakeholders. The legal and administrative framework within which individuals, firms, and governments interact determines the quality of the public institutions of a country and has a strong bearing on competitiveness and growth. It influences investment decisions and the organization of production and plays a key role in the ways in which societies distribute the benefits and bear the costs of development strategies and policies. Good private institutions are also important for the sound and sustainable development of an economy. The 2007–08 global financial crisis, along with numerous corporate scandals, has highlighted the relevance of accounting and reporting standards and transparency for preventing fraud and mismanagement, ensuring good governance, and maintaining investor and consumer confidence.
6th pillar: Goods market efficiency
Countries with efficient goods markets are well positioned to produce the right mix of products and services given their particular supply-and-demand conditions, as well as to ensure that these goods can be most effectively traded in the economy. Healthy market competition, both domestic and foreign, is important in driving market efficiency, and thus business productivity, by ensuring that the most efficient firms, producing goods demanded by the market, are those that thrive. Market efficiency also depends on demand conditions such as customer orientation and buyer sophistication. For cultural or historical reasons, customers may be more demanding in some countries than in others. This can create an important competitive advantage, as it forces companies to be more innovative and customer-oriented and thus imposes the discipline necessary for efficiency to be achieved in the market.
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7th pillar: Labor market efficiency
The efficiency and flexibility of the labor market are critical for ensuring that workers are allocated to their most effective use in the economy and provided with incentives to give their best effort in their jobs. Labor markets must therefore have the flexibility to shift workers from one economic activity to another rapidly and at low cost, and to allow for wage fluctuations without much social disruption. Efficient labor markets must also ensure clear strong incentives for employees and promote meritocracy at the workplace, and they must provide equity in the business environment between women and men. Taken together these factors have a positive effect on worker performance and the attractiveness of the country for talent, two aspects of the labor market that are growing more important as talent shortages loom on the horizon.
8th pillar: Financial market development
An efficient financial sector allocates the resources saved by a nation’s population, as well as those entering the economy from abroad, to the entrepreneurial or investment projects with the highest expected rates of return rather than to the politically connected. Business investment is critical to productivity. Therefore economies require sophisticated financial markets that can make capital available for private-sector investment from such sources as loans from a sound banking sector, well-regulated securities exchanges, venture capital, and other financial products. In order to fulfill all those functions, the banking sector needs to be trustworthy and transparent, and—as has been made so clear recently—financial markets need appropriate regulation to protect investors and other actors in the economy at large.
11th pillar: Business sophistication
Business sophistication concerns two elements that are intricately linked: the quality of a country’s overall business networks and the quality of individual firms’ operations and strategies. These factors are especially important for countries at an advanced stage of development when, to a large extent, the more basic sources of productivity improvements have been exhausted. The quality of a country’s business networks and supporting industries, as measured by the quantity and quality of local suppliers and the extent of their interaction, is important for a variety of reasons. When companies and suppliers from a particular sector are interconnected in geographically proximate groups, called clusters, efficiency is heightened, greater opportunities for innovation in processes and products are created, and barriers to entry for new firms are reduced.
12th pillar: Innovation
The last pillar focuses on innovation. Innovation is particularly important for economies as they approach the frontiers of knowledge, and the possibility of generating more value by merely integrating and adapting exogenous technologies tends to disappear. In these economies, firms must design and develop cutting-edge products and processes to maintain a competitive edge and move toward even higher value-added activities. This progression requires an environment that is conducive to innovative activity and supported by both the public and the private sectors. In particular, it means sufficient investment in research and development (R&D), especially by the private sector; the presence of high-quality scientific research institutionsthat can generate the basic knowledge needed to build the new technologies; extensive collaboration in research and technological developments between universities and industry; and the protection of intellectual property.

Appendix B: Global Competitiveness Index 2016–2017 rankings p43-50
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CHAPTER 1.2 Modernizing the Measurement of Drivers of Prosperity in Light of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Updated Global Competitiveness Index
p56-57 SELECTED ISSUES: DISCUSSION AND PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Four subindexes
Innovation
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According to the latest thinking, innovation occurs in an ecosystem where businesses, regulations, and social norms promote connectivity, creativity, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and the adoption of the latest technologies to generate new ideas and bring new products and business models to market. These concepts are measured by four pillars: technological adoption, market size, business dynamism, and innovation capacity. … As long as new ideas cannot find a practical implementation they might contribute to knowledge accumulation but they do not immediately translate into advances in human welfare. In some cases finding a practical application for a new idea is just a matter of time, because technological progress in other fields has to occur before these ideas can be put into practical use. It is, however, crucial for a country to develop the skills and the conditions that can ignite the process of transforming abstract innovation into new products and processes.

Appendix: Updated Global Competitiveness Index Structure p63-75

CHAPTER 1.3 The Executive Opinion
Survey: The Voice of the Business Community
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UK Vol.55 (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics)

Here is an article, The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics: In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next? (21 August 2016) | @martjacques. Excerpts are on our own.

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. … Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. …
… Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
… The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.

… They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. …
It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
… And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014.
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded…
As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. …

… This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellentessay in Foreign Affairs: “‘Populism’ is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like.” …
…a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. …
… For many decades, the idea of the “working class” was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. …
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labour movement. …

The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly strong, it is now dismal. … Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation.
…the recovery has been so weak and fragile… the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced in the 1930s. … Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.
… From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States, with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. … Thomas Piketty … Tony Atkinson and Angus Deaton … Ha-Joon Chang …

… But the zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. …
But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman, what is the point of a social democratic party if it doesn’t represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically they were supposed to represent. …
… Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not. …
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. …

… the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. … It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. …
… Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.

… Donald Trump … His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. …
… Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. …
… As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.
… He points to Japan and South Korea, and Nato’s European members as prime examples. …
…Trump’s position represents a major critique of America as the world’s hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left. He is a populist of the right. …
Trump may well… But this does not mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation… will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining ground. … And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.


Ireland Vol.7 (FDI and Irish Economic Development over Four Stages of European Integration)

Here is also a paper, FDI and Irish Economic Development over Four Stages of European Integration (PDF, January 2006) | Frank Barry, University College Dublin. Underlines, italicization, excerpts, et al. are on our own.

  1. Introduction

Ireland is the most FDI-intensive economy in Europe.  Foreign-owned firms account for almost 50 percent of Irish manufacturing employment.  This compares to an average figure of 23 for the Western European EU member states and a figure of 33 for the three largest Central and Eastern European economies.  Of the 17 EU countries plus the US and Norway for which OECD (2005, E7) provides data, Ireland also records the highest share of services-sector employment in foreign-owned firms.  These figures are reflected in the value of the stock of foreign direct investment (FDI).  Per head of population, the Irish inward FDI stock is a multiple of the EU average.

The distinguishing feature of the country’s development strategy over the last four decades of outward orientation has been the emphasis placed on attracting FDI.  The country had been remarkably successful in this regard even before the “Celtic Tiger era” of the 1990s and beyond.  Having stumbled upon the strategy, it turned out with hindsight to accord well with Ireland’s advantages:  its Atlantic location and English-speaking environment, relatively low labour costs by Western European standards, cultural connections with the US and Western European standards of governance.

The present paper analyses the co-evolution of institutional features of the Irish economic environment and the types of FDI available to European economies. We divide the period of Irish outward orientation into four distinct phases.

The first phase of Irish trade integration with Continental Europe began in the late 1950s when the country moved away from protectionism, dropped its restrictions on foreign ownership of industry and adopted a zero rate of corporation tax on manufactured exports.  These moves drew in substantial numbers of US firms who exported into mainland Europe (as opposed to the UK, which remains to this day the dominant export destination of most Irish domestic firms) even though substantial tariff barriers remained against Irish-produced goods.  Increased openness saw the country adopt the main proposals of an influential OECD report on primary and secondary education in 1965, which sparked a dramatic educational expansion at all levels.

The second phase began when Ireland joined the EU in 1973.  This brought a substantial increase in FDI inflows which – in response to the upgrading of the Irish tertiary educational system – began to locate in higher-technology sectors.  Macroeconomic instability over the period of the oil shocks however prevented Irish convergence on average Western European living standards over this period.

The third integration phase was driven by the Single European Market, the global high-tech boom and domestic policy adjustments in Ireland.  The outlawing of restrictive public procurement practices on the part of EU governments allowed Ireland’s locational advantages come more strongly to the fore; the low-corporation tax environment proved especially beneficial to high-tech MNCs who are better able to exploit its benefits; Ireland’s continued educational upgrading remained an important magnet for such firms, while fiscal consolidation, EU regional aid and the institutions of social partnership brought further competitiveness gains.  Furthermore, the EU-enforced inter-sectoral harmonisation of corporation tax rates in Ireland brought the Irish rate on services down dramatically just as global services-sector offshoring began in earnest.

The fourth phase arose as a consequence of Ireland’s convergence on average Western European living standards over the Celtic Tiger era and the accession of other low corporation-tax states to the EU.  This required Ireland to focus more on developing its national system of innovation in order to target the increasingly technology-sourcing foreign direct investment flowing into and across Europe.

  1. Phase 1: from Protectionism to EU Accession (1958-1973)

Ireland remained protectionist for about a decade after most of the rest of Western Europe had moved towards freer trade. The post-war boom of the 1950s saw Western Europe achieving growth rates of almost 6 percent per annum while protectionist Ireland stagnated with a growth rate of less than 2 percent, and an employment growth rate of less than 1 percent.  The need to import the more sophisticated capital and consumer goods that the country could not produce for itself led to balance of payments crises and macroeconomic instability, exactly as happened in protectionist Spain at around this time. The depressed economy of the 1950s saw more than 400,000 Irish people emigrate, out of a total population of less than 3 million.

By the end of the 1950s it was clear that economic policy would need to be completely overhauled.  The First Programme for Economic Expansion, which removed protectionism, encouraged foreign direct investment and promoted exports, was introduced in 1958.  The Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, which aimed to liberalise trade with the country’s major trading partner of the time, the United Kingdom, came into force in 1966, and both countries acceded to the then European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.  The move towards openness was accompanied by the introduction of a zero tax rate on profits derived from manufactured exports and a liberalisation of the law on foreign ownership of companies. As the bulk of the country’s exports at that time were agricultural in nature, there was little diminution of the tax base when the concessionary tax rate was adopted.

O’Hearn (1987) has estimated employment levels in the new foreign firms that entered Ireland to avail of the zero tax rate on manufactured exports.  By the time of EU entry these firms accounted for slightly more than half of all foreign-firm employment in manufacturing, with the remainder accounted for by the mainly UK firms that had entered Ireland to cater to the home market, whether under protectionism or in the outward-oriented era. …

…most of the growth prior to EU entry was in traditional or low-tech sectors such as Textiles and Clothing, Metals Industries (such as aluminium extrusions, shipbuilding, cranes, metal nuts), Pulp and Paper, and Rubber and Plastics.

The FDI inflows of this period led to Ireland developing a revealed comparative advantage (at the SITC-1 level) in Chemicals (whose share of exports grew from less than one half of 1 percent at the end of the 1950s to 6 percent at the time of EU entry) and in “manufactured goods classified by material” and “miscellaneous manufactured articles”.

The growth in foreign industry also contributed to a substantial diversification of Irish exports away from the UK market, with the then 6-country EU share of manufacturing exports rising by 10 percentage points between the late 1950s and the early 1970s.

It is of interest to note that though the numbers of new foreign firms establishing operations in Ireland accelerated as EU accession drew closer, the impact of EU membership on inbound FDI would have been unclear a priori, since accession entailed the loss of Ireland’s preferential position in the UK market.

The increased intellectual openness of the period saw Ireland (and later Austria) volunteer to allow the OECD conduct a survey of the entire national education system.   An important feature of the subsequent report, issued in 1965, was that – almost for the first time – technocratic expertise was now to be heard alongside the party political and denominational interests which had previously dominated ministerial councils (Logan, 1999).  The report was scathing in its assessment of the Irish system, noting that over half of Irish children left school at or before the age of thirteen.  This finding generated newspaper headlines and presaged the introduction of ‘free’ second-level education and free access to special transport networks for all second-level school pupils in 1967.  These measures sparked a dramatic educational expansion over the course of the 1970s and subsequently.

Notwithstanding Ireland’s early successes in attracting FDI, there was no convergence on average Western European living standards over this period, nor indeed until the late 1980s.  This is arguably ascribable to Ireland’s “regional economy” character, where, because of the historic ease of emigration to the UK, Ireland can be thought to have little control over its net-of-tax labour costs (though there were substantial insider-outsider problems in the labour market also).  This would have prevented Ireland from industrialising through the development of low-wage consumer goods exports as each of the other traditionally less developed Western European economies – Portugal, Spain and Greece – did in the 1960s…

  1. Phase 2: From EU Accession to the Single Market Era (1973-87)

Although Ireland was already relatively FDI-intensive at the time of EU entry, the number of jobs in foreign-owned manufacturing industry grew by 23 percent between 1973 and 1980, before declining subsequently as a consequence of macroeconomic mismanagement.

Although Ireland’s low corporation-tax environment is particularly attractive to high technology firms, the increasing technological intensity… would not have been possible without the educational advance touched upon in the last section.

The structure of the Irish education system that emerged in the wake of the OECD report is unusual in that while Ireland just matches the OECD mean in terms of those with university qualifications, it has far higher proportions than the average OECD country with specific post-secondary and sub-degree tertiary educational qualifications…

The post-secondary education system that emerged in Ireland was based on a realisation that, unlike in the UK – whose early industrialisation had ensured the evolution of a well-developed system to provide an intermediate layer of technicians – the education system in Ireland would need to provide this intermediate layer from scratch if human resources were to be available to sustain the industrial expansion… that followed on from Ireland’s relatively late trade-liberalisation-driven industrialisation.

The main components of the technical-education system developed in Ireland over the course of the 1970s were the Regional Technical Colleges (later rebranded as Institutes of Technology), for which there was no UK model.  These offered subdegree programmes of shorter duration than those at universities and concentrated in the fields of engineering and business studies, and their curricula had a practical orientation designed to be responsive to the needs of local industry and business.

From having had a tiny short-cycle third-level sector before 1970, by 1981 Ireland had internationally, after the Netherlands, the highest proportion of third-level students taking sub-degree courses.  Since the late 1970s, furthermore, the universities themselves – at the behest of the national development agency, the IDA – had begun to accept increased responsibility for ensuring that manpower needs were met.  The Manpower Consultative Committee was established in 1978 to provide a forum for dialogue between the IDA and the education system.  The state agency, concerned by the looming disparity between electronics graduate outflows and its own demand projections, convinced the government to fund a massive expansion in educational capacity in these areas.  The output of engineering graduates, as a result, increased by 40 percent between 1978 and 1983, while the output from computer science increased tenfold over the same short period.  The IDA in turn was able to use the rapidity of this response – exemplified by the immediate introduction of a range of one-year conversion courses to furnish science graduates with electronics qualifications –  as a further selling point to foreign investors; MacSharry and White (2000).

…the major expansions were in computing equipment and electronic components, pharmaceuticals and medical and optical devices, and these expansions continued into the following “Celtic Tiger” era.

Once again over this period however, notwithstanding the continued success in upgrading the country’s sectoral FDI allocation, no convergence was recorded on average Western European living standards.  Unlike in the previous era (1960-73) however, this lack of convergence was replicated across all the poorer Western European economies… Barry (2003) identifies deficient macroeconomic policymaking across all these four countries in the wake of the oil shocks as a common factor behind their weak performance, suggesting that poorer countries may be structurally less capable of adhering to appropriate monetary and fiscal policies in the event of a downturn in the world economy.  Convergence is also known to be more difficult to achieve when the encompassing world economy is performing poorly.

  1. Phase 3: The Single Market, Services Offshoring and the Celtic Tiger

In this phase, running from 1987 to the present, all four cohesion economies converged substantially on average Western European living standards, with Ireland’s performance being particularly dramatic. The various factors behind the Irish performance are discussed in detail elsewhere, e.g. in Barry (2004).  Here we focus solely on the contribution of FDI.

Manufacturing FDI into and within Europe expanded in the late 1980s. …with respect to US investments in Europe, with the US Department of Commerce Survey of Current Business (March 1991) attributing much of this to the lead up to the introduction of the Single European Market in 1992.  The figure also shows that Ireland captured a growing share of US investments in Europe. MacSharry and White (2000) explain this latter effect by describing how several larger EU countries, in the pre-Single Market era, “had suggested to potential investors that publicly funded purchases of their products might be blacklisted if the new investment was located in Ireland” (rather than in the countries from which the threatening noises issued).   With the outlawing of restrictive public procurement practices under the Single Market initiative, the attractiveness of Ireland as a destination for FDI increased.  This effect would undoubtedly have been dampened without the concurrent restoration of macroeconomic stability.

The increasing share of high-tech sectors in European manufacturing over the 1990s also helped, as did the high profitability of the era, since both increase the attractiveness of a low corporation-tax environment.  Altshuler, Grubert and Newlon (2001) argue, furthermore, that US foreign investment has become more sensitive to differences in host country taxes in recent years, and Ireland has had – until the recent enlargement – the lowest rate of corporation tax in the EU.  The Single Market programme may also have allowed Ireland achieve a critical mass of US firms in certain sectors, allowing agglomeration and demonstration effects to come into play (Barry, Görg and Strobl, 2003).

Thus the number of jobs in foreign-owned manufacturing in Ireland expanded by almost 50 percent between 1987 and 2000.

Combined with this increase in manufacturing FDI, Ireland also began to attract increasing services-sector FDI inflows (Grimes and White, 2005).  Starting from a base close to zero in the late 1980s, by the new millennium, foreign-firm employment in each of Ireland’s strong FDI-intensive manufacturing sectors is now matched by foreign-firm employment in several offshore services sectors located in Ireland.  Thus computer software now matches hardware, international financial services matches pharmaceuticals and other business-process offshored (BPO) activities match employment levels in instrument engineering.  Furthermore, as Barry and Van Egeraat (2005) show, as computer hardware firms have shifted their manufacturing facilities to Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, they have upgraded their operations in Ireland into services activities.

An indicator of Ireland recent successes in offshore services… Though Ireland has only around 1 percent of the EU15 population, it attracted 50 percent of new shared services projects in the EU15 and 8 percent of regional headquarters projects in the period to which the data refer.

It is well known that the share of services in international FDI flows has been increasing over recent decades (UNCTAD 2004).  Ireland’s ability to attract an increased share of services was facilitated by substantial reductions in the rate of corporation tax on services over the course of the 1980s and 1990s… These changes were generally made of the behest of the European Commission.   Export Profits Tax Relief, for example, began to be phased out in 1978, to be replaced by a special 10 percent rate for manufacturing industry.  From 1987 this special rate was extended to qualifying activities carried out at the newly opened International Financial Services Centre in Dublin. Most other market services meanwhile continued to be subject to the standard 32 percent rate that prevailed at that time.  The European Commission had been pushing for some time for tax harmonisation across sectors, implicitly hoping that Ireland’s rate would be pushed much closer to the EU average.  The Irish government instead decided in 1998 on a harmonised rate of 12.5 percent –to be instituted from 2003 – which yielded substantial benefits to most services sectors in order to cushion the impact on manufacturing.

Table 7: Ireland’s corporation tax regime

  • 1956: Finance Act introduces Export Profits Tax Relief (EPTR), primarily for manufacturing industry, with 50 percent tax remission on profits (increased to 100 percent two years later). The measure provided full relief for fifteen years and tapering relief for a further five years.
  • 1969: EPTR extended to 1989-90.
  • 1978: Government abolishes EPTR and replaces it with a special 10 percent rate of corporation profits tax for all manufacturing industry from 1981-2000. Those qualifying for export-tax relief before 1981 continue to benefit until 1990.
  • 1987: Financial Services Act establishes International Financial Services Centre in Dublin. Profits of qualifying activities carried out from the Centre are taxed at 10 percent until 2005.
  • 1990: Government extends the 10 percent corporation profits tax rate to 2010.
  • 1998: Agreement with European Commission on universal 12.5 percent corporation tax for all trading companies from 2003. All existing commitments to the 10 percent tax rates for manufacturing industry to the year 2010 to be honoured. The current 28 percent standard rate applying to most Services to be reduced by 4 percent annually in 2000, 2001 and 2002, and by 3.5 percent in 2003, giving a 12.5 percent rate at that date.

The Finance Act 2004, furthermore, established a new headquarters regime aimed at attracting international corporations to establish their regional HQ in Dublin.  This has further served to attract other activities such as shared services and treasury management (Finance Dublin Yearbook, 2004).

  1. Phase 4: Science, Technology and Innovation Policy and the Offshoring of R&D Functions

Offshoring of R&D facilities is a growing phenomenon.  Kuemmerle (1999a) tracked 32 MNCs in the pharmaceutical and electronics industries and found that their overseas R&D staff increased from 6 percent in 1965 to more than 25 percent today, while the number of overseas R&D labs increased from 14 to 84.  His study distinguishes between “home-base-exploiting” R&D sites (which are associated with traditional FDI, where firms set up overseas to exploit on a larger stage the advantages, such as brand names, that they had already accumulated) and “home-base-augmenting” or technology-sourcing cites.  The former are found to be more likely to be located close to existing factories and important markets, while the latter are more likely to be located close to universities.  The proportion of R&D labs that Kuemmerle categorises as home-base-augmenting rose from 7 percent to 40 percent over the period he studied.

The 2005 UNCTAD World Investment Report provides broader and more detailed evidence on the recent growth in global offshoring of R&D functions.  This provides the context for recent developments in science, technology and innovation (STI) policy in Ireland.

Given the growth in offshoring of R&D, along with Ireland’s convergence on average Western European living standards by the early years of the new millennium –  and perhaps also in response to the threat of increased corporation-tax competition from Central and Eastern Europe – science, technology and innovation policy has recently moved to the heart of the Irish policy agenda.

This was heralded by the release in 1996 of the first-ever Irish Government White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation.  It is underlined by the five-fold increase in investment in these areas under the current National Development Plan (2000-06), by the launch in 1998 of the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (which established 24 major research centres as well as major programmes in human genomics and computational physics), by the establishment of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) in 2000, and by the introduction of a 20 percent tax credit for incremental R&D in the Finance Act of 2004.

The origins of Science Foundation Ireland lay in a Technology Foresight Exercise organised by the state body Forfás, which asked client company executives where they saw their companies headed over the next 10–15 years, and what the Irish government could do to respond to those changes. The response was that as Ireland was no longer a low-cost manufacturing location it would have to develop more highly trained engineers, research scientists etc. to become a center for innovation, research, design and development.

The exercise proposed the establishment of a Technology Foresight Fund to promote and finance new basic and applied scientific and technological research in Ireland, and SFI was set up to administer this fund.  Besides providing awards to support scientists and engineers working in designated fields (along the lines of the US NSF), SFI has established a host of joint partnerships between third level research institutions and industry.

Within ICT alone, the last few years have registered a number of significant developments under this new strategy.  Bell Labs has announced its intention to set up a major R&D centre at Lucent Technologies’ Dublin facility, linked with the establishment of a collaborative academic centre at one of the city’s universities. Similarly, Hewlett-Packard announced the establishment of a world-class Technology Development Centre at its manufacturing facility outside Dublin, while its European Software Centre entered into collaboration with NUI-Galway in establishing the Digital Enterprise Research Institute.  Intel has established an innovation centre at its main site outside Dublin and increased its investment in its research centre near Limerick.  It has also partnered three Irish universities in an academic Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices.  IBM over the same period announced significant investments in its R&D software facility in Dublin – a decision influenced, according to one of the company’s directors, by the availability of the necessary skills, the strong support of the IDA and the increasing role of SFI.  A number of similar investments have also appeared recently in the biotech and pharmachem areas.

Conclusions

Ireland’s success in attracting FDI can be ascribed to the following factors:

  • EU membership, macroeconomic stability, Western European governance standards and an English-speaking environment
  • a low corporation tax rate
  • the skills and experience of the country’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA)
  • the quality of the telecommunications infrastructure, and
  • an educational system that is integrated to a large extent with the country’s FDI-oriented development strategy.

As one of the first countries in the world to adopt an FDI-focused development strategy (in the late 1950s), the country has had an extensive period of time to fine tune its policies and institutions in line with the requirements of international FDI. This has allowed it to continue to succeed as FDI flows into Europe have shifted progressively from traditional to higher-tech manufacturing sectors through services offshoring and more recently into the offshoring of R&D functions.

Though a late starter – by Western European standards – in increasing educational throughput, Ireland by 1981 had, after the Netherlands, the highest proportion of third-level students taking sub-degree courses.  This was a relatively inexpensive option for the country for follow, a strategy arguably justified in the case of a relatively poor European country.  By international standards tertiary enrolments were heavily biased towards science and engineering, which accorded with the requirements of the MNCs that the country was trying to attract.  As convergence on Western European living standards was progressively achieved and as offshoring of R&D has grown, the emphasis has increasingly switched towards university and postgraduate education.

As shown in the appendix, the country’s IDA has also functioned effectively as a learning organisation through its transnational strategic networks. The strong focus on the importance of FDI in Ireland and the position of the IDA in the policymaking hierarchy ensure that the system is configured to respond rapidly to emerging market opportunities as well as changing factor-market conditions in Ireland.

One example, discussed earlier, concerns the pace of response to the looming disparity, once recognised, between electronics graduate outflows and the IDA’s demand projections for such graduates. Another example is provided by the response to an EU Directive in the 1980s which allowed financial services companies, once established and registered with the regulatory authorities of one EU member state, to operate in any other member state. The directive freed firms to locate in countries where they found the regulations to be most favourable. Ireland was the second country after Luxembourg to implement the directive, in 1989. In addition the authorities decided to forego VAT and inheritance taxes on certain investment fund activities and two further items of legislation were enacted in 1990 to facilitate the development of investment funds. The industry’s activities in Ireland expanded dramatically in response and by 2005 the country had become one of the world’s leading locations for the domicile and administration of investment funds (Barry, Thebault and Wojcik, 2006).


UK Vol.53 (Post-EUref tweets Vol.5)

Here is really just a part of (analytical) tweets concerning the Brexit through earlier July.

@EvanLSolomon on the questions that Brexit poses for the Three Amigos and political parties | @MacleansMag

My column, on why Brexit seems so uncertain, and what a Canadian PM can do | @InklessPW

Recent interview with CFPS faculty fellow Ruben Zaiotti: Six Things for Atlantic Canadians to know about BREXIT vote | @dalcfps

Suddenly very relevant legal analysis | @benjaminwittes @opiniojuris

The defensive reflex of legal liberalism: more process. | @avermeule

Brexit – What’s next? [Soundcloud] | @LowyInstitute

Where is globalisation after Brexit? Me on @TurnbullMalcolm’s mixed messages | @SamRoggeveen

Here’s our Exec Director on how Brexit will influence Australian politics | @McKellInstitute

Our @cooneymj pondered brexit and #ausvotes last November in Queries for @FEPS_Europe | @ChifleyResearch

‘The worst impact of Brexit will come as a result of Britain’s shrinking international defence and security role.’ | @ASPI_org

The view from London: avoiding a European meltdown after Brexit | @JEyal_RUSI @ASPI_org

What Brexit Decision Means for Australia – @wellings_ben | @ausoutlook

Russia and Europe’s Far Right – James Leask | @ausoutlook

How will a Brexit vote play out around the world? Here’s what our experts had to say [Soundcloud] | @APPSPolicyForum

Should I stay or should I go? Asia-Pacific views on Brexit [Soundcloud] | @APPSPolicyForum

REGREXIT aftermath –  @GraftonQuentin and @theshepherdsdog on leadership gone wrong | @APPSPolicyForum

Nice piece on Brexit from a post colonial perspective by @RowCouch | @RDNS_TAI

What a Brexit Vote Means for Australia – Lee Smales | @ausoutlook

Brilliant new issue of Journal of Australian Political Economy @ProfSteveKeen @JimboStanford @grhutchens | @AdamDavidMorton

Brexit is a gift to Moscow – a geopolitical blunder. An emboldened Russia will benefit from division in the EU. | @actoncavanough

Sharpest ever fall in the pound. 10 % in a matter of hours. @BBCWorld | @actoncavanough

How will NATO’s European members adapt to Brexit? Via @Macquarie_Uni’s John Andrews | @ProSyn

ANU Law expert Anne McNaughton discusses the broader geo-political repercussions of a Brexit @RNSundayExtra | @ANU_Law

Brexit serves as a warning: An ascendant Asia doesn’t guarantee ASEAN’s survival – @DrMattDavies, @ANUBellSchool | @aseanstrategic

Brexit is a great setback for the security of the Western world, ANU expert Stephan Fruehling says @ANUBellSchool | @ANUmedia

Brexit shows we need to reform the EU + contest xenophobic populism w/ Prof Philomena Murray | @unimelb

Could the Brexit vote result in the UK remaining in the EU on improved terms?, Associate Professor Mark Melatos | @USydneyEcon

For the English, Brexit will mean economic pain: by Professor Stephen King via@conversation | @MonashUni

Brexit stage right: what Britain’s decision to leave the EU means for Australia via @ConversationEDU | @MonashUni

Witless white noise, virulent ugliness: Brexit debate plays out its last scenes via @ConversationEDU | @MonashUni

Anger, fear & excitement. UQ’s Elizabeth Brown shares implications of the Brexit vote. | @UQ_News

Want to know more about Brexit and the Bregrets that have followed? [Podcast] | @UQ_News

What now for Australian research in a post-Brexit world? via @ConversationEDU | @uwanews

The Brexit effect goes way beyond finances and will impact global security – @JohnBlaxland1 | @ABCthedrum

Britain has voted to exit the European Union. So what happens now? | @smh

Brexit protest draws thousands of people in London | @FinancialReview

Here are Bruce Yandle’s predictions for the US economy through 2016 | @mercatus

Has the Brexit referendum resulted in a years-long waiting game? #EWInextgen | @EWInstitute

See what Brookings experts are saying about the historic Brexit Vote, what it means for the US, and more | @BrookingsInst

Prof Kim Schoenholtz on fundamental questions related to global financial stability after Brexit @MoneyBanking1 | @NYUStern

Brexit might have cost banks $165 billion, @nyustern economists find | @nyuniversity

Prof Brad Hintz on the challenges to the European banking industry & the financial market impact of Brexit | @NYUStern

Brexit claims its first victim: the environment. New UK PM May shuts down Department f/ Energy & Climate Change | @BerkeleyLawCLEE

Pluralist political orders may be real losers in Brexit, writes @SSestanovich: @politico | @ColumbiaSIPA

Actual process of Brexit “is going to drag on for quite a while,” says Seamus O’Cleireacain: @pbsnewshour | @ColumbiaSIPA

Does Brexit vote make trade deals less attractive to Latin America? @ChrisSabatini: @foxnewslatino | @ColumbiaSIPA

“Brexit is a symptom of globalization’s deeper ills,” writes @JeffDSachs: @BostonGlobe | @ColumbiaSIPA

CGEG Director @Jan_Svejnar answers 5 questions re: Brexit; what is next for Great Britain & European Union | @CGEG_Columbia

What Comes Next for Europe? @YaleSOM professors talk Brexit implications. | @YaleInsights

David R. Cameron, professor of political science and director of the program in EU studies, comments on Britain… | @YaleMacMillan

Professor Jon Macey talks to @CNBC about how lawyers may be winners in a Brexit divorce | @YaleLawSch

Faculty Associate Harold James on Brexit: “Brexit’s supporters must now prove that they made the right choice.” | @PrincetonLISD

Jeremy Siegel and Joao Gomes tell us what the Brexit means for the US Economy [w Podcast] | @PennWhartonPPI

The IMF warns that the Brexit will affect the Eurozone’s economic growth | @PennWhartonPPI

Brexit signifies a new world where once robust democracies have grown fragile. @stephenWalt explains what went wrong | @BelferCenter

Brexit: Legal Implications by @sullcrom | @HarvardCorpGov

Economically, Brexit very bad but if any EU member could overcome withdrawal symptoms, UK might be the one | @PankajGhemawat

Ultimate backstabbing. I just love british politics. | @ThomasPHI2

“Brexit was a courageous thing to do” argues @cohen_eliot in his latest for @aminterest | @SAISStrat

Europe’s Loan Borrowers Rush to Refinance Before Brexit Vote. | @michaelgofman

@USCMarshall @TheNickVyas @USC_GSC Larry Harris share what you need to know about Brexit

Will Brexit affect you? | @SFStateCoB

There’s one group who isn’t the slightest bit surprised by Britain’s shock vote to leave the EU: the psychologists. | @LifeAtPAU

What the Brexit Vote Means for the US Economy | @TheFiscalTimes

How hard will Brexit hit the US economy? | @csmonitor

What the Brexit vote means for the US economy | @YahooFinance

What Brexit means for the US economy | @voxdotcom

Hillary Clinton on Brexit: ‘first task’ is to ensure ‘uncertainty created by these events does not hurt’ US economy | @ABCPolitics

What does today’s Brexit vote mean for the US economy? @Aarondklein explores | @BrookingsEcon

US is unprepared for potential post-Brexit financial panic | @SputnikInt

JUST IN: Yellen warns Brexit could have “significant repercussions” on US economy | @thehill

Thoughtful post-brexit proposals for “responsible nationalism” by @LHSummers | @jacklgoldsmith

UK citizens would start paying a high price from the morning after a vote for Brexit, Nick Bloom @Stanford @CEP_LSE

@GregDaco discusses the risks related to Brexit, impact on US economy & markets via @CNBC @PowerLunch | @OxfordEconomics

Great read on the BREXIT by @transferwise founder @taavet – an Estonian immigrant living in London, working in tech | @ElianCarsenat

Still undecided on #EUref ? Check out our dedicated Brexit page here | @CCBSCrossBorder

Irish Government Brexit Contingency Plans Announced | @merrionstreet

READ: Statement by Minister @CharlieFlanagan in response to the outcome of the UK referendum | @dfatirl

Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny in Brexit row after saying Scotland shouldn’t be “dragged out” of EU. #ScotlandinEurope | @1johnmacdonald

On brexit, social mobility and political participationfrom @latimes | @csinuffield

BBC’s surprisingly negative view of legal stops 2 Brexit, based mostly on theory that Parliament will fall into line | @mfroomkin

Around 20 banks, unfazed by Brexit, to invest 500 million sterling in Britain: PwC | @Reuters

@fsb_policy & other business groups call for clear leadership & action Brexit Vote

Today @fsb_policy wrote to @OliverLetwinMP to fight for smallbiz post Brexit

Government must give ‘shot in the arm’ to businesses following Brexit vote @szupingc | @fsb_policy

@GoodwinMJ speaking at @fsb_policy report launch, discussing post-Brexit politics

Post #EURefResults – what @fsb_policy is doing to help smaller businesses

Small business confidence marked record plunge ahead of Brexit vote, @fsb_policy says | @telebusiness

See full @SEUPB statement on the referendum decision

This article in Spiegel on EU views of Brexit is well worth reading | @D_G_Alexander

After ‘Brexit,’ Amsterdam is top 1 EU financial center contender @liamstack (@nytimes) | @FDIMagnet

The lessons Latin America can learn from Brexit and the EU | @TheEconomist

Central banks key defence after Brexit. Source: The Straits Times | @UBS

What’s the impact of Brexit on European stocks? | @UBS

After Brexit: 10 asset classes you did not necessarily think about, by CIO Mark Haefele | @UBS

What are the currency options for Scotland if it leaves the UK? Read $BK Simon Derrick’s blog | @BNYMellon

After the Brexit? Analysts differ of opinion if the foreseen lower State budget must effect defence expenditures. | @martinbroek

The world’s markets brace for the harsh effects of Brexit | @rahksharma

Data regulation: Britain faces data privacy issues after Brexit #cyber #DataOps #OpenData | @JohnSnowLabs

Brexit has negative consequences for the UK economy, but how it will impact the rest of the Europe? | @CreditSuisse

How low can the pound go Post Brexit? Shahab Jalinoos discusses on @BloombergTV | @CreditSuisse

Official Statement from Credit Suisse CEO, Tidjane Thiam on the UK Referendum Results | @CreditSuisse

How will Brexit impact oil demand? @CreditSuisse’s David Hewitt explains to @CNBC | @csapac

Brexit Will Curtail UK’s Engagement in Balkans, Experts :: @BalkanInsight | @BesarLikmeta

Read our Brexit dossier. Also featuring Professors Clapham, Tille, @BaldwinRE & Hanhimäki. | @IHEID

3 factors that could hold Europe together: by @iheid alumnus Jennifer Blanke | @IHEID

@james_rogers and @LuisSimn write about the strategic implications of Brexit for @EuroGeostrategy…


UK Vol.51 (Post-EUref tweets Vol.4)

Here is just a part of (analytical) tweets concerning the Brexit through AM 4 July (BST). Excerpts are on our own.

The Political Economy of Brexit – new @UniofBathIPR blog from @IPR_NickP | @UniofBath
…productivity gains in manufacturing steadily reduce employment in the sector, shifting workers into services… Workers are also exposed to globalisation in very different ways. High union density in Scandinavia means that the open, trading economies of the Nordic countries are combined with collective wage setting and strong social protection. …Germany has a highly paid skilled working class in its export sectors, combined with burgeoning low skilled, deregulated service sector employment.
Post-industrial areas – particularly in Wales and Northern Ireland – benefit significantly from EU structural funds, and their governments will advocate on their behalf. But these funds aside, who will speak in the Brexit negotiations for the interests of those people who have just voted to leave?…
Labour is the historic political arm of these workers but it now faces a double bind. If it advocates staying in the single market on EEA terms, which is critical to exporters like Nissan and Airbus, as much as to the City, it will have to concede free movement. Its metropolitan strongholds are proud of their diversity, and the welcome they give to migrants, but its post-industrial heartlands are not…
Let us then say that Britain cannot obtain good terms for Brexit. In the current febrile state of EU politics, there will be a phalanx of states that are unwilling to let the UK have the best of both worlds. There are national government veto points too, particularly if the deal is “mixed”…
Article 50 is silent on whether a country…can reverse its position and withdraw its notification. …another reading is that the text becomes one those creative non-spaces that Europe has used repeatedly in its passage to union. Constitutional experts suggest that it may be possible to “withdraw a withdrawal” – though the ECJ might be asked to provide a ruling. …
Instead of arguing that parliamentarians should ignore the referendum result, refuse to trigger Article 50, or simply propose the UK should remain in the EU, pro-European parties should commit to a second referendum, and put pressure on the Conservative Party to do the same…

A Treaty Revision too far – @PoLIS_Bath Alim Baluch responds to Brexit | @UniofBath
Prof Charlie Lees:…now one of the unforeseen consequences will be that Scotland is likely to have another referendum on Independence, which the SNP is highly likely to win, and in Northern Ireland there will be renewed questions over Irish unification…
Dr Nick Startin: If the EU is to survive, the reform agenda…must be embraced as a matter of urgency. Transparency, accountability and democracy are the key…
Prof Chris Martin:…the greatest worry is the very sharp drop in the share price of major banks. The financial crisis of 2008-9 showed the almost existential dangers of a financially vulnerable banking system…
Dr Susan Milner:… First, anger and disappointment of those who felt left behind by economic development translated into a classic rejection vote. The voting count showed this starkly as a geographical divide. Second, the Leave campaign was able in the last few weeks to channel the sense of democratic renewal which had galvanised the earlier Scottish referendum campaign and to articulate it in the theme of ‘regaining control’. In this they were undoubtedly assisted by EU leaders’ own failure to frame European integration as a people’s rather than an elite project…
Prof Nick Pearce:…The 20th century was a story of the contraction of England and the end of Empire. But only now is the reverse logic of Seeley’s master narrative being fully realised… What is England now? What is her role in the world? Alas, the referendum debate told us nothing of these things; it was sour, parochial and mendacious…
Prof Bill Durodié:…Despite the economic and migration concerns of the elites thrown up in the referendum debate it is those from whom power and authority truly derive who have now spoken the clearest. The European Union now stands discredited with an uncertain future as other electorates will surely take their lead from the United Kingdom and demand their own referenda to leave too.
Prof Graham Room:…Many expect the EU to negotiate a hard bargain, if only to discourage others who might think of heading for the exit, and in order to counter the right-wing nationalist elements which many of them face within their own countries… Nothing in the EU Treaty would prevent the UK government from doing this: and then allowing the result of that second referendum to abort the withdrawal process…
Dr Ali Baluch:… But it is exactly this Treaty Revision which went too far for many Eurosceptics… It generally opposes the Treaty Revision of Lisbon which effectively strengthened the European Parliament, thus reducing the democratic deficit. But it is exactly this Treaty Revision which went too far for many Eurosceptics…

Our #EUreferendum report published earlier this month made exactly the same warning [w PDF] | @UniofBathIPR
Figure one: Demand-side variables as influences and impacts on referendum outcome
· Immigration – freedom of movement, Schengen, refugee crisis
· Security – terrorism, borders, Fortress Europe
· Economic Crisis – the ‘Rational Choice’ debate – how much does
the EU cost? Is the UK better off in or out?
· Climate Change – should the EU take a lead? Are fossil fuels
‘man-made’?
· EU ‘democratic deficit’ – sovereignty, transparency, reform? –
EU positives?
Figure two: Supply-side variables as influences and impacts on referendum outcome
· Political parties and civil society groups
· Domestic political leaders/elites
· Civil society and business leaders/elites
· The campaigns: Britain Stronger in Europe, Vote Leave, and Leave.EU
· EU, EU nation-state and international leaders
· Media: broadcasting media (BBC, Sky), the tabloid press and social media

Game theory offers a better way forward in Britain’s EU drama @BathSofM @ConversationUK | @UniofBath
…The looming referendum was designed to increase the UK’s bargaining power, but it fell flat and the other leaders called his bluff, making limited concessions.
An important concept in game theory when it comes to winning negotiations is the idea of making “credible threats”. For Cameron’s threat to be credible (and therefore effective) it required the other EU leaders to believe he had such influence over the referendum outcome that he could determine a vote to remain or leave…
… Step in behavioural economics and behavioural game theory, which incorporates psychology, emotions and social preferences – such as our sense of fairness, trust and empathy – into the standard economics models. It recognises that people may care about others – and particularly working with others for a common goal. …if we add empathy into models of the prisoner’s dilemma – where each player cares sufficiently about the other – it can transform the game into one of mutual cooperation, enabling a win-win situation for both players…

#EURef & the lack of a politics of hope – @aurelmondon @PoLIS_Bath writes for @openDemocracy | @UniofBath
… As reported by a recent IPSOS MORI survey for the Observer, ‘the biggest survey of its kind ever conducted,’ ‘Nine out of 10 of the country’s top economists working across academia, the City, industry, small businesses and the public sector believe the British economy will be harmed by Brexit’.
This confirms other claims by prominent experts and stakeholders that if one believes that neo-liberalism and the capitalist system are the basis of a strong national economy, then leaving the European Union would be a terrible, even stupid, idea.
This therefore begs the question as to why the Prime Minister, who has declared that he ‘yields to no-one’ in his ‘enthusiasm for capitalism’, would promise a referendum on the question in the first place. … The choice is between a neo-liberal UK within a neo-liberal EU and a neo-liberal UK without a neo-liberal EU…
… As the General Election campaign made clear, the referendum promise was dictated by the Conservatives’ lack of faith in their own beliefs and driven by their fear of a radical right upsurge. In a poorly thought-through manoeuvre, Cameron moved rightward in an attempt to occupy a gap partly filled by UKIP.
… Cameron was right on two out of three counts: Labour’s role in the campaign has been minimal and UKIP has been rendered almost voiceless, even before the referendum takes place. However, the price he paid to keep the hyped threat of UKIP in check was probably not worth the reward.
After all, UKIP has failed to have a real electoral impact beyond the EU parliament apart from forcing a short-sighted promise on the referendum, something for which the Tories have only themselves to blame.
… Brexiters will in fact be willing to reclaim position in a party whose leadership they have virulently attacked and threatened for months…
… What we are thus witnessing in this campaign is not a debate about two different worlds, it is a debate about two visions of the same thing, one bad and the other worse. This is not politics. This is not democracy. This is not what we deserve. This referendum will take us no closer to a better Europe. However, it will have unleashed yet another wave of identitarian politics that will come crashing against the already greatly weakened defences built by those who strive for a just and equal society. …

@Lord_Sugar made his case for Bremain this morning, but what would Brexit mean for London? | @UniofBathIPR
…The single market guarantees free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. The rules ensuring these “four freedoms” are enforced by the ECJ. The ECB is taking an increasingly prominent role in ensuring the stability of the financial system in the Eurozone. It has ultimate supervisory responsibility for all banks in the Eurozone and has direct supervision of the largest Eurozone banks…
…There are two broad types of banking, retail (for example, bank lending to firms and households) and wholesale (for example, trading on foreign exchange markets or buying and selling financial securities and derivatives). Within Europe, the City of London dominates the latter.  Average daily turnover in the UK foreign exchange market exceeds US$2.5 trillion per day. London is the largest global centre in Euro foreign exchange markets, with daily trade of over US$ 1 trillion. This is nearly 45% of global trades, a figure that far exceeds any country that belongs to the Eurozone. The City is also dominant in markets for swaps, especially interest rate swaps.  Although these are obscure and complex financial products, they are central to the daily business of large financial institutions. London-based trades in these assets amount to over US$ 1.3 trillion per day…
…account for 10% of GDP and 12% of UK tax receipts. Directly or indirectly, they employ over 330,000 people, many in high-skill, high wage jobs. Banking and Financial Services is one of the few areas where the UK has a large and consistent trade surplus, of nearly £47bn…
…Optimists argue that Brexit would allow the City to flourish in a low regulatory environment as the UK frees itself from the burdensome regulations of Brussels.  But this is highly subjective…
… Although the long-term impact of Brexit is deeply uncertain, it is clear that the UK would have to do very well in the negotiations that would follow a vote for Brexit in June. Just to keep things as they are, three things would have to happen. First, the UK would need continued access to the single market, with recourse to the ECJ for adjudication and enforcement of the rules of the single market…similar to those negotiated with Switzerland or Norway… Second, the UK would need continued access to the TARGET system for clearing payments in the Eurozone. Although not a member of the Eurozone, the UK used the rules of the single market to gain access to TARGET. Access to this allows UK-based financial institutions to more easily participate in inter-bank and other short-term money markets in the Eurozone. …non-Eurozone EU members should have the same ability to transact in the common currency as Eurozone members.  …continued access to TARGET would be problematic in the event of Brexit.  Thirdly, the UK would have to negotiate arrangements similar to the current passport system of financial regulation. Currently, the UK benefits greatly from the “passport” system whereby financial institutions based in the UK can provide financial services in all EU countries without further financial regulatory requirements. In effect financial institutions can use their compliance with UK financial regulations as a “passport” to operate anywhere in the EU. The financial services passport is a major reason why many foreign banks, especially American and Swiss ones, have large UK-based subsidiary operations. The presence of these large banks then encourages Eurozone-based banks like BNP-Paribas and Deutsche Bank to also base a large part of their operations in the UK…

In an #euref debate growing more heated and strident by the day, Dr Papadopoulos presents a higher cause to remain | @UniofBathIPR
Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well?
Hacker: That’s all ancient history, surely?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We ‘had’ to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing…
Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It’s just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.
Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: Yes… We call it diplomacy, Minister.

How democratic is the EU? Our Euro integration expert @bathsofm gives his verdict. May not be what you think | @UniofBath
… Smaller states are over-represented in the European Parliament and voter turnout at elections is usually significantly lower than turnout for national government elections – although this is hardly the European Parliament’s fault. …

New @PoLIS_Bath blog on #EUReferendum from Dr @NicholasStartin – Brexit or Bremain? | @UniofBath
The EPP, which in effect, comprises Centre Right MEPs from across the member states including the German CDU and the French neo-Gaullist Republicans, remains the largest party in the EP. Historically it has had, and still retains, a pro-EU outlook. The Conservative party famously withdrew from the group following the European elections in 2009 and set up the smaller, more EU-critical grouping called the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)…

Latest piece: Is the EU anywhere near getting its own army? with @sjasmith brexit @UniofBathIPR @UniofBath | @DJGalbreath
…But in a speech on May 9 outlining why the UK would be more secure if it remained in the EU, the prime minister, David Cameron, said suggestions of an EU army were “fanciful” and that the UK would veto any suggestion of it.
As Cameron pointed out, there is a significant gap between the rhetoric and reality of the establishment of a fully functional European army.
The creation of a European army is a long way off and by no means inevitable. Even the most supportive nations, such as Germany, would acknowledge this reality.

Debate on post-Brexit national security has been heated this week; for cooler analysis, read @DJGalbreath’s blog | @UniofBathIPR
…Policing, intelligence and military officials have seen the EU become an important part of their portfolio since the 1980s. As the foreign policy scholar Professor Christopher Hill has argued, European policy has become ubiquitous for UK departments and agencies as they seek to engage with the problems that face the UK and Europe. To see this as simply the EU intervening in UK policy areas across the board is misleading because this is to ignore the effort that successive UK governments have taken to enable the EU to do regional security better, especially in areas that do not concern territorial defence…
…outside we are less coordinated against a transnational problem, while inside we are subject to the challenges of free mobility that the EU’s Schengen zone presents to a borderless Europe. The UK already maintains its own borders and remains outside the Schengen zone; however, the UK has been a victim of ‘home grown’ terrorists, such as the 7/7 bombers…
…the focus on national sovereignty versus EU member status is misleading because in an ever-increasing globalised and trans-national world, the benefits of both are lower. Perhaps even more importantly for the UK, the main sources of political violence are those who are born and raised in Britain. While there is a trans-national quality to their indoctrination, their threat to public safety is not impacted by debates about borders. They are very local problems that will not cease with the settlement of the Brexit referendum…

Should voters take Carney’s Brexit warning seriously? Dr B. Morley examines Britain’s economic future in this blog | @UniofBathIPR
…When the UK was considering joining the Euro in 2003, the UK government published five criteria to determine if joining would be in the UK’s national interest. In many respects the broader issues addressed by these points are still relevant when considering the UK’s relationship with the Eurozone…
…in 2014, 44.6% of UK exports were to the EU and 53.2% of UK imports were from the EU, however the UK’s trade deficit with the EU, reached £59 billion (exports minus imports) in 2014, although in the same year it recorded a surplus of £15.4 billion in the service sector…
… Under the single rule book, the European Banking Authority (EBA) will ensure that Basle III is implemented in a consistent manner across the EU. However Basle III is a voluntary code and there are already suggestions that its implementation will impede world economic growth by between -0.05 and -0.15% per annum (OECD, 2011), so there are reservations among some member states about implementing it…
…This has directly affected the UK financial system previously, when a previous write down of Greek sovereign debt in 2012 involved private investors in Greek government debts having to accept a 50% write down in the value of the debt, known as a haircut.
However over recent months this problem has been reduced, following the decision of the European Central Bank (ECB) to carry out Quantitative Easing (QE). This mainly involves the ECB buying government bonds from all the Eurozone member states in proportion to the size of their respective economies…
…None of the bailouts or financial strategies used so far are really confronting the fundamental problems in the Greek economy or the Eurozone as a whole. In particular the structural differences in the economies across the Eurozone, which mean that a common monetary policy is not always appropriate. The fundamental problem is arguably a lack of convergence across the Euozone economies and the moves to encourage greater convergence could affect the non-Eurozone members too…
the Euro depreciates when the risk of a Eurozone break up increases, in addition it also created increased volatility in the currency. However a devalued Euro is not necessarily all bad news for the Eurozone, as it can encourage their exports and economic growth. Although, countries that rely on exporting to the Eurozone, such as the UK will potentially suffer…
This recent crisis has again highlighted the need for a longer term solution to the problems in the Eurozone… This could possibly involve greater fiscal integration within the monetary union and many economists… a fiscal union should be formed in order to prevent future crises…

Is it about to get lonelier at the top? New blog by @mcbaluch on the German view of Brexit and uncertain #EUfuture | @UniofBathIPR
Following the financial crisis of 2007/08, which affected Germany far less than other countries of the EU, Germany’s economic dominance is more pronounced than ever before, leaving German governments more exposed to meet leadership expectations from the United States and its European partners…
All the major European integration projects have been designed or strongly endorsed by Germany whether it is the Single European Act, the Schengen Zone, the Economic and Monetary Union or enlargement. The European Central Bank (ECB) has been designed using the German Federal Bank as its role model. …
The alienation between the two conservative parties started long before Cameron became Prime Minister…
A significant proportion of the isolation felt by the Tories in Europe has to be seen in correlation with a change of course in the European Parliament, i.e. Cameron’s decision that his party was to leave the European People’s Party (EPP), which came despite several warnings by other European conservatives that such a step would not be without consequences. …
While British Europhiles can be quick to criticise Cameron’s clumsy diplomacy, the German response was not helpful either. On the domestic front, party leader Cameron was not only trying to keep UKIP small but was also under pressure from influential Eurosceptic groups in his own party. Publicly threatening him to reconsider his course of action made it almost impossible for him to adjust his position without losing face. …
…Once a tolerated pariah in the EPP, the Tories have since reinvented themselves as the most prominent and influential member of the smaller ECR…
German-British relations were further strained when the German right-wing populists of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) joined the ECR in summer 2014. …
…There was considerable unease with the AfD members over a meeting with the far-right Freedom Party of Austria FPÖ and remarks that using firearms was a legitimate way of protecting borders against refugees…
For German governments of the future, Brexit would mean the loss of the second largest economy within the EU. The historically problematic picture of German domination in Europe would be even more difficult to conceal… “It would leave Europe exposed to a dominance of Germany that Germany doesn’t want and no one else wants.”
From a German perspective, Merkel’s handling of the EU will be extolled against the long shadow of history. Her impact will be compared to Willy Brandt’s vision for Europe, whose short Chancellorship managed to change gears from East-West confrontation to “change through rapprochement”…
…Cameron will be expected to renegotiate the agreement from February and other Eurosceptic parties can use this example as leverage in election campaigns. What many European voters may perceive as the carrot can, in a Hegelian twist, very well be Merkel’s stick.
…Brexit or even just the example set by the British referendum can boost the Nexit camp…

What Thatcher did for pro-Europeanism and other issues. New blog on the social bases of the EU referendum camps | @IPR_NickP
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the Conservative Party that led Britain into membership of the European Economic Community. Seeking a new anchor for Britain’s geo-political interests after decolonisation and the fiasco of Suez, and despairing of the capacity of Britain’s post-war Keynesian economic settlement to solve its class conflicts, Conservative leaders orientated towards Europe’s successful social market models…
Both positions were upended by Thatcherism, which imposed a new political economic settlement on the UK that dispensed with the coordination of class interests, while shifting to a more aggressive Atlanticism in foreign policy. Europe was no longer a source of inspiration for economic policy, but instead an enlarged free market for British trade…
The prominence of finance services in Britain’s post-Thatcher economic model – and the taxes they contribute to the financing of public services – ensures that their interests have considerable political support…
Similarly, access to the single market explains the solid support for the EU amongst large companies, in both manufacturing and service sectors…

“There is no fixed EU to remain in” says Prof Bill Durodié @PoLIS_Bath in his latest #EURef blogpost. | @UniofBath
…In Italy, in part due to the once seemingly endless saga surrounding Sylvio Berlusconi and his eventual replacement by an unelected EU bureaucrat in 2011, there are several parties fighting for the accolade of being anti-elite, which include the Lega Nord that adopts a regionalist perspective and comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, which campaigns against corruption in politics…

Listen again to @CharlesLees2 @PoLIS_Bath on @ABCaustralia talking Corbyn Labour & Brexit | @UniofBath

Brexit special podcast @ConversationUK with Prof Bill Durodie of @PoLIS_Bath on what #EURef means for the UK

Juppe: pragmatic over Brexit terms but would scrap Le Touquet & return border controls from Northern France to UK | @IPR_NickP

Brexit is is on – experts including @PoLIS_Bath ‘s Bill Durodie respond for @ConversationUK | @UniofBath
Here, leading experts offering explanations and opinions on what is an unprecedented geopolitical and economic situation.

Boris bails – or are we falling for another trick by magic Johnson? – @CharlesLees2 @PoLIS_Bath / @ConversationUK | @UniofBath

Superb – David Runciman on Brexit for @Juncture_IPPR | @IPR_NickP

@IPR_NickP blog on the worldview of Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove | @UniofBathIPR

@POLIS_Bath’s Professor @CharlesLees2 for @ConversationUK on the impact of Brexit for the Conservatives | @UniofBath

ICYMI: Experts from @UniofBath have their say on Brexit vote | @BathChron

Catch @NicholasStartin @PoLIS_Bath Down Under on @ABCaustralia talking Brexit shortly | @UniofBath

England has voted to leave the European Union and in so doing has imperilled her own union | @UniofBathIPR

Russia’s leaders are happy about Brexit, it won’t help the regime at homewrites @JPaulGoode in @washingtonpost | @UniofBath

New Dr Felia Allum & Annarita Criscitiello blogpost for @UniofBathIPR – What does Italy think about Brexit? | @IPR_NickP

Blog on the political economy of Brexit and some musings on Article 50 and a 2nd referendum | @IPR_NickP

How Marketers Brought Britain to Brexit – by @DrGiesler and @avishankar @SchulichSchool @BathSofM | @DrGiesler

Clear thinking and sound analysis as always from @IPR_NickP HT @GavinJKelly1 The Political Economy of Brexit | @juliaunwin

Brexit could start EU domino effect, warns new @UniofBathIPR Policy Brief | @UniofBath

As Britain goes to the polls @NicholasStartin @PoLIS_Bath gives his analysis on the #EURef campaign to @ABCaustralia | @UniofBath

Couldn’t join us for the #EURefBath debate yesterday? Read about the key moments | @UniofBathIPR

The #EUreferendum 1 month countdown starts….now –  @PoLIS_Bath @UniofBathIPR

To understand the Brexit debate it may help to know what other EU states think. The IPR blog gives the big picture | @UniofBathIPR

Labour is caught in a bind between its metropolitan and working-class heartlands says @IPR_NickP in @guardian | @UniofBath

Jeremy Corbyn could transform the Brexit debate – but does he want to? @CharlesLees2 writes for @ConversationUK | @UniofBath

Read the response by @SKinnock to essay by @IPR_NickP and me | @GavinJKelly1

Great comparative analysis of EU & UK democracy and the sovereignty question by @Barristerblog. #EURef | @StAndrewsUniCGC
… The British economic success story has been closely linked to trade with the single market. 44.7% of British exports now go to the EU (and another 8% if we include single market members Norway and Switzerland): in purely economic terms it would be deeply reckless to risk damaging that market without a very clear strategy of how Brexit would be managed…
…Most divorces have two characteristics: first, they are always worse than anyone thought imaginable; secondly it is the children who suffer the most. This one will be no exception. If we walk out of the EU it is our children who will pay, with economic stagnation and unemployment, all the more bitter for having been foreseeable and avoidable.
The central political arguments are these: The EU is undemocratic; The EU has removed sovereignty from the UK Parliament.
…If you are going to have a single market there is a need for common regulations about trade; and if there are to be common regulations there has to be some sort of supranational authority to make them. Without some such authority it is hard to see how the EU, and certainly not the single market, could function in anything like its current form. On many important issues: education, social services, health, most criminal law and most taxation…
…In 2015 the EU’s total budget was about £128 billion: by comparison in 2014 – 15 total UK spending was nearly 6 times that at £735 billion. Despite being the fourth biggest net contributor to the EU, the UK pays just 0.6% of its Gross National Income to Brussels. Largely thanks to Mrs Thatcher, this is by some way the smallest proportion of GNI paid by any EU member…
…Participation in European elections is generally low throughout Europe: in the UK it hovers around 35%, roughly the same level as vote in most local council elections…
…Part of the difficulty is that… They perceive that increasing democracy in the EU would in all probability lead to increasing its power…
How important is the EU’s lack of democracy? Most written democratic constitutions – that of the United States is an obvious example – deliberately include undemocratic elements… two examples from the US constitution: the President is chosen not by popular vote, but by an electoral college made up of representatives from the states of the Union… US Supreme Court judges, who have enormous power, including the power to overturn statutes, are unelected, unaccountable and for practical purposes unsackable…
The democratic camouflage is that a draft of any of these regulations (known as “statutory instruments”) must be laid before each house of Parliament before they become law.
The reality is that in practice statutory instruments are barely scrutinised by Parliament at all…
…For practical purposes they are far less scrutinised than EU legislation.
…since 1979 the House of Commons has not rejected a single one…

Britain’s Democratic Failure by Kenneth Rogoff via @ProSyn | @StAndrewsUniCGC

Very interesting – Five legal points about the Leave victory | @StAndrewsUniCGC

A way to keep Scotland in EU & UK? Detoxifying UK’s exit from EU: a multi-national compromise is possible via @brexitvote | @StAndrewsUniCGC

Cogent piece by Prof Colin Kidd: the golden opportunity that could become Sturgeon’s nightmare via @guardian | @StAndrewsIR

The NHS and Europe: Five must reads | @CPPHdurham

In today’s @IrishTimes, Dr @aoifemod writes, ‘Brexit: Villiers can’t claim border controls won’t be reintroduced’ | @DurhamLawSchool

Professor Nigel Driffield says the UK’s Inward investment will suffer long-term damage following Brexit | @WarwickBSchool
“Those championing Brexit often comment on how trade would be unaffected, so long as we were to stay within some looser trading arrangement with the EU, but most seem to assume that inward investment would remain unchanged.
Our research has found that is not the case, it would greatly reduce the level of FDI to the UK and for those people who think there might be just a short-term ‘blip’ we have found it will take four years to recover and even then the long-term trajectory will be lower…”
…turnover by foreign-owned businesses in the UK is more than £12.5 billion, with the North of England, Wales and Scotland being much more reliant on foreign-owned manufacturing…
“Out of all of these possible events only two positively affected the long-term trend: entry into the EEC in 1973, and entering the single market in 1992.
Meanwhile, only two events caused a reduction in the long-term level of inward investment flows: the UK leaving the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 and Harold Wilson devaluing sterling in 1967…”
…Inward investment is of vital importance to the UK economy, not merely because of the employment opportunities foreign firms create, which often occur in areas of high unemployment, but also because it creates technology transfer and secondary employment through the supply chain…

@LouiseHBeaumont @ftlive have we reached peak uncertainty? This man might know | @WarwickBSchool

Farming was all but ignored in the #EUref media debate despite major economic implications | @lboroCRCC

Here’s what our @lboroCRCC team discovered this week about #EUref media coverage | @lborouniversity

Article 50 press mentions increase from 1.8 to 49.5 times per day following Brexit | @lborouniPR

80% press coverage pro-Brexit, Loughborough analysis finds | @lborouniversity

Brexit had an 82% advantage over Remain in terms of newspaper coverage | @lboroCRCC

Which papers support brexit? Loughborough research behind @HuffingtonPost article | @lborouniversity

Women accounted for just 16.5% of all politicians on TV & 14.9% in the press | @lboroCRCC

Did Corbyn fail to get his message heard? @bbcworldservice features our research | @lborouniversity

Statement from our Vice-Chancellor Professor Robert Allison on #EURefResults | @lborouniversity

“Imperial is, and will remain, a European university” | @imperialcollege

What happens now? The UK post-Brexit. Prof Alison Harcourt’s article in Politics Home. | @UofESSIS

UK votes to leave the European Union – what does this mean for us? | @UniofExeter

What could brexit mean for language learning? Read @guardian’s article on this topic | @UofEHumanities

Blockchain: what happens now? Phil Godsiff reports @sbsatsurrey @unisurreynews @philgodsiff | @SurreyCoDE

Economist @geraintjohnes discusses the options which the UK faces after the EU Referendum on TRT World | @LancasterManage

Brexit and Forecasting: In this blog, Robert Fildes offers his thoughts on the forecasts made during the campaign | @LancasterManage

How divided is the UK post-Brexit vote? Lancaster’s Dr Mark Garnett debates on @AJEnglish | @LancasterUni

V.good: social class + low turnout of under 25s explains (most) of Brexit vote, R.Johnson et al.  @LSEpoliticsblog | @simonjhix

David Runciman on how the “Remainers” can, and will, bypass the result of the referendum | @prospect_uk

“This isn’t over. Gove did need Boris. And Boris hasn’t spoken yet.’ Behind the scenes of the drama | @BBCMarkMardell


UK Vol.50 (Post-EUref tweets Vol.3)

Here is just a part of (analytical) tweets concerning the Brexit through early AM 29 June (BST). Excerpts are on our own.

16 things you need to know about the process of leaving the EU | @ConUnit_UCL
… 8. The process of withdrawal will involve three sets of negotiations:
First will be the negotiation of the withdrawal terms themselves. These will likely include, for example, an agreement on the rights of UK citizens already resident in other member states and of EU citizens resident in the UK. As Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott has explained, those rights – contrary to what some have said – are for the most part not protected under existing international law.
Second, it will be necessary to negotiate a trade deal with the EU. The official Vote Leave campaign confirmed that it wanted such a deal and correctly pointed out that everyone’s interests would be served by having one. … But there will be greater difficulties in services. Open Europe (which campaigns for EU reform and was neutral in the referendum) highlights particular difficulties in financial services, where it rates the chances of maintaining current levels of access to the EU as ‘low’.
Third, the UK will have to negotiate the terms of its membership of the WTO and will want also to negotiate trade deals with the over 50 countries that currently have such deals with the EU, as the existing arrangements will no longer apply to the UK from the moment of Brexit. The WTO itself has warned that this will not be straightforward: the UK will not be allowed just to ‘cut and paste’ the terms of WTO membership that it currently has through its EU membership. Similarly, while we might hope that other countries will agree quickly to extend the EU rules to the UK, we cannot presume that all will – and the UK itself might want different terms in some cases.

What does triggering Article 50 mean for the UK? Our @alanjrenwick explains | @ConUnit_UCL
… 3. The terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the nature of our future relationship with the EU will be worked out through negotiations with the remaining 27 member states, as set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
4. Article 50 skews the balance of power in the negotiations in favour of the continuing member states. That is because of the two-year rule and the unanimity requirement for extensions to that period.
5. It is sensible that the Prime Minister has left triggering Article 50 to his successor.
6. It is vanishingly unlikely that the UK could withdraw without triggering Article 50 at all.
7. Both sides in the campaign have agreed that this whole process will take several years, during which the UK will remain in the EU. …

… Scenario 1: avoiding Article 50 to avoid Brexit
… Boris Johnson said ‘There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says No.’ …
Scenario 2: avoiding Article 50 to secure better Brexit terms
… Indeed, the Vote Leave campaign appears to recognise … ‘We do not necessarily have to use Article 50 – we may agree with the EU another path that is in both our interests.’ …

Constitution Unit briefing paper: ‘Brexit: Its Consequences for Devolution and the Union’ | @DanielGover
… Under the Sewel Convention, however, the UK government has said that it will not normally legislate on a devolved matter without the consent of the devolved legislature, and similarly always sought the consent of the devolved legislatures, before extending their powers… Sionaidh Douglas-Scott suggested that if they wished to express their opposition to Brexit, or to increase their leverage during the Brexit negotiations, the devolved assemblies might be reluctant to grant legislative consent to the widening of their powers implied in removing the EU law constraint. This would take us into uncharted constitutional territory. …

Will Brexit lead to the break up of the UK? via @ConUnit_UCL | @Huw_Pritchard
… First, forecasts of the financial viability of an independent Scotland depend heavily on the oil price… Second, if an independent Scotland joined (or remained in) the EU, while England and Wales headed for Brexit, that might require for the first time the creation of a hard land border between England and Scotland. Third, if Scotland has to re-apply to join the EU, it may be required to join the Euro, which is a requirement for all new member states. This last factor might be a reason for Scotland seeking to hold an independence referendum soon, before the UK leaves the EU, so that Scotland does not have to re-apply from outside. The Scottish Parliament does not have a clear power to hold an independence referendum, because under the Scotland Act 1998 the constitution is a reserved matter…

IFS Director Paul Johnson reflects on the role & impact of economists in the referendum debate | @EconUCL
… Of course, other things mattered, and mattered enormously, but it is clear that economists’ warnings were not understood or believed by many. So we economists need to be asking ourselves why that was the case, why our near-unanimity did not cut  through. In short, we need to understand the abject failure of our profession to persuade the public about the consequences of a Leave vote. …

Political and legal consequences of Brexit for the UK and the EU | @ConUnit_UCL

This interesting analysis by Joshua Rozenberg @guardian cites Lord Lisvane on our blog | @ConUnit_UCL
… So I would expect the UK’s negotiations with Brussels – ahead of an article 50 notification – to continue into next year. If there is a significantly better deal on offer, the new prime minister might choose to put it to the people – not, I suspect, by holding another referendum but by calling an early general election.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 allows for this in two possible ways. One would require the support of two-thirds of the House of Commons. The other can be done by passing a vote of confidence on a simple majority…
… my own view is that the government will require, at the very least, a majority vote in the House of Commons before proceeding. One might have argued that a kamikaze prime minister could have triggered article 50 immediately after the referendum result was declared, using his prerogative powers. Those powers are used to sign treaties but not, I would argue, to put them into effect in the UK. In any event, there is a growing constitutional convention that prerogative powers are subject to parliamentary approval, as we saw with the Commons vote in August 2013 against air strikes on Syria.
… Lord Lisvane, the former clerk to the House of Commons, has pointed out that it is not as simple as repealing the European Communities Act 1972, under which the UK joined what is now the EU.

As well as our analysis, here’s @ProfMarkElliott’s excellent briefing on constitutional fallout from #EUref result | @ConUnit_UCL
First… as a matter of international law, the UK as a State continues to be subject to its obligations under the EU treaties, and that, under the 1972 Act, EU law remains applicable in the UK and has priority over UK law. Legally and constitutionally, nothing has changed yet. …
Second… Once the Member State makes the decision to withdraw and gives the European Council notice of its intention to leave, the clock begins running and — subject to two exceptions — the treaties cease to apply to the departing Member State after two years. The first exception is that the two-year rule does not apply if the departing State reaches agreement on the terms of departure before the expiry of the two-year period. The second exception is that the European Council — with the agreement of the departing State — can agree to extend the negotiation period beyond two years.
Third… The legislation that provided for a referendum to be held said nothing whatever about the effect of the outcome of the referendum, and the result does not place the Government under any legal obligation to secure Brexit. … Rather, the will of the people has been expressed through an advisory referendum, and the making of the decision whether to withdraw remains a matter for the Government. However… Political reality is something else entirely. …

Do people tend to vote against change in referendums? | @UCL_EI
… Looking at all national…referendums from democracies since 1990…, we can consider whether the status-quo option tends to win. We find that actually the change option won a majority of the votes cast in 186 out of 268 referendums, i.e. 69 per cent of the time.
On the other hand, that figure might be misleading. Many countries have extra thresholds for a vote for change to count as valid: either that turnout must exceed a certain minimum or that support for change must pass a minimum proportion of the eligible electorate. Once we take this into account, only 106 of the 268 referendums (40 per cent) have actually passed.
The question therefore arises of which of these measures more accurately reflects how often publics are willing to back change. …

It’s Brexit. As the UK – and Europe – wakes up to a new reality, here is a first round of reactions from UCL staff | @UCL_EI

UCL Provost’s video message about the EU Referendum result, reassuring UCL staff and students from the EU | @uclspp

Leaving the EU: UCL’s statement | @ucl

Lastly, our final #EUref forecast which predicts that Remain will win 52-48 | @ConUnit_UCL

200 academics led by @alanjrenwick @ConUnit_UCL sign letter criticising deliberate misinformation in EU Referendum | @uclnews

Brexit: what’s going to happen to our money now we’re leaving the EU? @swatdhingraLSE cited | @CEP_LSE
…the collapse in the pound would likely lead to a 3% rise in inflation, to between 4% and 4.5% by late 2017.
… Remain argued we could be in for a year-long recession, with at least 500,000 jobs lost and GDP around 3.6% lower than if we’d stayed in the EU. Real wages could be nearly 3% lower now, coming to a reduction of £800 a year for someone working full-time on the average wage…
… Britain will now be less attractive to foreign investors, with trade taking a knock of up to 2.6%. Manufacturing would also suffer, with car production dropping by 12% and car prices rising by 2% on average…

The EU isn’t snookering Britain. Britain is hoodwinking the EU. Comment from @johnvanreenen | @CEP_LSE

How bad will Brexit get? @johnvanreenen & other economists & economic organisations’ views, via @voxdotcom | @LSEEcon
Should We Stay or Should We Go?: The economic consequences of leaving the EU [PDF] | Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Thomas Sampson
… On average, trade agreements the EU has entered into over the past two decades have increased the quality of UK imports from its FTA partners by 26% and lowered the quality-adjusted price of imports by 19%… Overall, consumer prices fell by 0.5% for UK consumers as a result of FTAs with trade partners that are not EU member states, saving UK consumers £5.3 billion per year.
…Part of the attraction of the UK for foreign companies is as an export platform to the rest of the EU, so if the UK is outside the trading bloc, this position is likely to be threatened. This matters because foreign multinationals tend to be high productivity firms and they bring new technologies and management skills
with them. There is also some evidence of positive productivity spillovers from FDI undertaken in the UK. Indeed, given the large sunk costs involved in FDI, the uncertainty generated by the possibility of an in-or-out referendum may have a negative impact on investment in the run-up to the vote…

Would it fly? A possible Article 50 route to a second referendum… | @lsebrexitvote

External perspectives on Brexit? Prof Kevin Featherstone’s LSE Commission report | @LSEEI
[PDF] External Perspectives on the UK’s membership of the European Union: Report of the hearing held on 1st March, 2016 | LSE Commission on the Future of Britain in Europe (Rapporteur: Kevin Featherstone (LSE))
• The immediate ‘Brexit’ impact would be shock and uncertainty over how it can be managed. The best strategy for Britain’s partners would be to wait for London to present its proposals for a future relationship. Importantly the 27 are unlikely to agree a first offer.
• The alternatives to EU membership (following the Norwegian, Swiss, or Canadian models) are unclear, would be costly for the UK and produce few advantages. The search for a different solution might set precedents for new framework agreements with other countries like Turkey and Ukraine.
• Economically, both sides will have an interest in trying to reach a trading deal as soon as possible, if the political climate allows it.
• Brexit will threaten an important market for continental exporters.
Likewise, the EU27 represent a major market for UK exports.
• On the EU side, member states will lose a major net contributor to the EU budget. They may well seek a high price for continued access to the single market.
• Financially, the general uncertainty of a Brexit vote is likely to discourage FDI into Britain.
• The prospect of restrictions on free movement between the UK and the rest of the EU would likely entail economic costs for both sides.
• Without Britain, the EU might become more ‘inward-looking’. In Council decision-making with qualified majority voting, France will become more pivotal in a number of areas. Britain is a long-standing advocate of freer trade and meaningful structural reforms. The relevant coalitions supporting such policies in EU meetings may be significantly weakened.
• The EU would lose a member with one of its biggest military and diplomatic capacities, is its main advocate of interventionism, and which has the strongest link with Washington. ‘Brexit’ will weaken Europe’s ability to stand up to Putin’s aggression, its response to the
challenges of jihadism, and its rapport with East Asia.
• Politically, the domestic impact for Britain’s partners will be a boost to the extremes and to populists who advocate a block on Europe’s development or even their own exit.
• The presidential prospects of Marine Le Pen in France will look brighter and the voices of the far right in places like Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece and Poland will become louder.
• Following a ‘Brexit’ vote, the taboo over ‘GREXIT’ may begin to be lifted.
• Perhaps because other member states have been slow to react to the prospect of ‘Brexit’, a ‘no’ vote will shake the EU suddenly and deeply. It will pile on the agony amidst the migration and debt crises and deepen the general air of self-doubt.

After shock #eurefresult, what happens next? Full guide to Brexit negotiations from LSE’s foreign policy think tank Dr @timothyloliver | @lseideas
NEGOTIATION 1: UK Political
NEGOTIATION 2: UK Governance
NEGOTIATION 3: UK and non-EU Countries
NEGOTIATION 4: UK and the EU
NEGOTIATION 5: Within the EU
NEGOTIATION 6: EU Reform
Negotiation 7: The EU and the rest of Europe
Negotiation 8: The EU and the rest of the World
Negotiation 9: Ongoing EU business
Austria: Making use of UK-EU tensions for domestic purposes.
Belgium: Support for the UK staying in the EU, but European integration has priority.
Bulgaria: Brexit would be like UEFA without England’s national team and Wayne Rooney’s goals.
Croatia: a strong desire to see the UK stay.
Czech Republic: A United Europe is the Priority.
Denmark: Quiet but clear support for a close UK-EU arrangement.
Estonia: Practical questions for the Estonian EU Presidency.
Finland: Seeking good EU-UK relations, but the EU is the first priority.
France: Brexit or not, the EU shall not recede.
Germany: Thinking less about the UK and EU-UK relations, and more about the EU as a whole.
Greece: Concerns about the unity of the EU and Eurozone.
Hungary: Seeking a quick exit deal.
Ireland: An exercise in damage limitation.
Italy: Supports EU Integration with or without the UK.
Latvia: Safeguarding the EU project.
Lithuania: Brexit could have a hazardous impact on “ever closer union”.
Luxembourg: Protecting European Integration and Financial Services.
Malta: One of the Countries Likely to be most affected by Brexit.
Netherlands: Helpful, but no blank check.
Poland: Going the extra mile for Britain but not at all costs.
Portugal: Balancing a centuries-old alliance with a modern commitment to the EU.
Romania: Continued free movement to the UK will be the ultimate redline.
Slovakia: Quiet anticipation at the helm of the EU Council.
Slovenia: Hoping for a remain vote.
Spain: Brexit will be seen through domestic politics.
Sweden: Prioritising geopolitics and cultural proximity with the UK.

#LSEBrexitVote #EUref: A kingdom of many parts: analysing how Londoners and the English view the EU is key Dr @timothyloliver | @LSEpoliticsblog
UK1
UK2
EU approval in UK
To be or not to be in Europe: is that the question? Britain’s European question and an in/out referendum [PDF] | @timothyloliver
…whether the decision is to stay in or leave the EU, in order not to raise false expectations in both Britain and the EU the referendum must then be followed by better management of the European question. Failure to do so would allow the poison to return,
meaning the referendum would have been nothing more than a placebo.
So how can Britain’s European question be better managed? Here we might look to the debate in Scotland about its relationship with the rest of Britain. As James Mitchell has argued, the ‘Scottish question’—one of party politics, identity, constitution and political economy—can never be entirely answered, either through independence or through remaining in the United Kingdom…

Delaying talks with the rest of the EU is fraught with economic risk, warns @LSEEI Iain Begg | @lsebrexitvote
… A particular concern is the growing deficit on the current account of the balance of payments, which reached 5.2% of GDP in 2015 and, in the absence of shocks during 2016, was expected to stabilise at this level. … One of the last analyses issued prior to the referendum by the Treasury set out two scenarios for these effects, labelled respectively as ‘shock’ and ‘severe shock’. In both cases, three channels of negative effects were identified, with the differences between the scenarios arising from the intensity of the effects. They are: the uncertainty about the terms of a new deal between the UK, the remainder of the EU (rEU) and other parts of the world; the transitional costs of shifting to a new regime for trade and investment; and the effects on jobs and growth of financial stability.

Brexit against the wishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland violates the UK’s constitution | @LSEEuroppblog
… EU law is incorporated directly into the devolution statutes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Section 29(2)(d) of the Scotland Act 1998, for example, provides that acts of the Scottish Parliament that are incompatible with EU law are ‘not law’. A similar provision, section 6(2)(d), appears in the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Indeed, the status of the UK and Ireland as EU member states and signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights was fundamental to the negotiation of the Belfast or ‘Good Friday’ Agreement.
Amending the devolution legislation would be technically easy, but politically hazardous. It would add fuel to the fire stoked up by Scottish demands for independence. It would place ‘a bomb under the Irish peace process’. If Westminster is serious about Brexit it will have to terminate the devolution settlement it has so carefully crafted since before 1997…

Why Brexit Might Not Happen at All via @JohnCassidy | @LSEEurocrisis
… One possibility being floated by some pro-E.U. campaigners is a vote in the House of Commons against invoking Article 50. …under the British system, sovereignty rests in Parliament, and so the Leave vote was purely advisory.
… A more likely outcome is a general election, a second referendum, or both. In 2011, Britain switched to a system of five-year fixed-term Parliaments, and under that system the next election isn’t due until 2020. But the Brexit crisis has already generated calls for the fixed term to be junked.

The UK is Reaping What the British Media Have Been Sowing for a Long Time by @Maria_Kyriakid | @LSEEurocrisis
… Rupert Murdoch’s media have been the ringleaders of a blatant and well-sustained anti-EU campaign throughout the years of his reign in the British media landscape, a hostility based on Murdoch’s inclination for low taxes and weak media regulation.
…More media space and attention has been devoted to apparent internal conflicts within the Left over the last months rather than the eminent risk of a Brexit… What was needed was a more sustained coverage of the significance of the EU…

@borisjohnson: I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be | @LSEEurocrisis

The Future of Europe: So What if the British Are Leaving? via @SPIEGELONLINE | @LSEEurocrisis
… It is an irony of history that even if the British do not get the deal Prime Minister David Cameron negotiated with the other EU leaders, the remaining 27 countries could still implement some of its provisions. For example, a Romanian worker in Germany, whose children still live in Romania, should probably not be entitled to generous German child benefits. …

From our archive: Has the EU failed us, or have we failed to forge a European identity? by @prentoulis | @LSEEurocrisis
…There has been little enthusiasm in Britain for the ‘spirit’ of the Union, no desire for anything more than an instrumental relationship.
…Only a very small part of what the European project is or could be, is seen as relevant for Britain: it is good for business, and, yes, it may help maintain Britain’s position in the world – and one sometimes has to join the ‘allies’ in their dubious foreign endeavours. But it would be un-British to get too involved…
To be fair, it is not only Britain which is keen to retreat to its national borders and prioritize its national interests. The recent Swedish and Danish proposals that amount to the cancellation of Schengen are a self interested response to what actually is a European-wide challenge…
…Perhaps its biggest failure has been its inability to forge a European identity capable of transcending national borders. The emergence of new nationalisms (exploited skilfully by the far right), is an extremely worrying result of this failure.

Who won the referendum? via @openDemocracy by @profAFinlayson | @LSEEurocrisis
…a good way of understanding the politics of the UK right now is in terms of five different kinds of reaction to these cultural and economic changes…
Firstly, there are those people who like and benefit from both the cultural and economic effects… Most of these people voted Remain.
Secondly, there are people who like and benefit from the cultural effects of globalisation but not the economic ones… Remain.
Thirdly, there are people who like or benefit from the economic effects of globalisation but not the cultural effects… Leave.
Fourthly, there are those people who don’t like and have not benefited from either the cultural or economic effects of globalisation… Leave.
The Leave campaign much more clearly understood that the campaign was not really about the EU. It focused on cultural experiences and attitudes – hostility to the rules and regulations of social liberalisation, national pride and racial prejudice and wrapped an appeal to economic experiences within it…
The fifth group is those who like and benefit from both cultural and economic globalisation – but not as much as they would like… For these people the EU is a brake on progress: it is too slow and cumbersome, reliant as it is on face-to-face meetings, consultation and consensus, rules and procedures… they believe that movement should be freely determined by economic demand rather than the kinds of old-fashioned rights which enable EU citizens to go anywhere in the EU…
…They want to weaken the forces that prevent them from shaping the future as they imagine it must be: the sentimental Left, the statist EU, the traditional Conservative party…

Can Brexit Be Overturned? What Brits Are Asking Each Other Today via @business | @LSEEurocrisis

Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit | @LSEEurocrisis
1.THE GEOGRAPHY REFLECTS THE ECONOMIC CRISIS OF THE 1970S, NOT THE 2010S
2.HANDOUTS DON’T PRODUCE GRATITUDE
3.BREXIT WAS NOT FUELLED BY A VISION OF THE FUTURE
…many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn’t really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it… The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American ‘great again’ … is not a pledge or a policy platform; it’s not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it’s not even clear if it’s meant seriously or not. It’s more an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged in like a video game.
4.WE NOW LIVE IN THE AGE OF DATA, NOT FACTS
…What is a ‘fact’ exactly?…
…The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of ‘policy-based evidence’…
5.THE LEAST ‘ENSLAVED’ NATION IN THE EU JUST THREW OFF ITS ‘SHACKLES’

A Divided and Broken post-EUropean Britain via @ellie_knott | @LSEEurocrisis

The Disunited Kingdom: Scotland is dragged out by England New referendum highly likely via @TheEconomist | @LSEEurocrisis

Brexit vote sparks huge uncertainty for UK universities via @timeshighered @SamuelJPElliott | @LSEEurocrisis
“This outcome provides a real challenge for our sector. Science is an area where the relationship between the UK and the EU was particularly beneficial. Not least because scientists won billions of pounds of research funding for the UK, above and beyond what we put in. (€8.8bn between 2007 and 2013.) In addition, free movement of people in the EU made it easy for scientists to travel, collaborate and share ideas with the best in Europe and for companies and universities in the UK to easily access top talent from Europe.”

The downfall of David Cameron: a European tragedy | @LSEEurocrisis
…Instead, fatally as it has now transpired, he was always a “Eurosceptic – but not as Eurosceptic as you are”, as he put it to his first political boss, the former chancellor Norman Lamont. Cameron’s lifelong soft Euroscepticism meant he had no answer to the hardliners on Europe once the issue had become turbocharged by austerity and immigration…
The 2010 election, which was in most respects a triumph for Cameron, ensured ever more frantic juggling. Going into coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats meant the referendum on UK membership of the EU that many Conservatives continued to advocate was put in the deep freeze. The coalition’s official policy was that there would be no in/out referendum and that only Cameron and Nick Clegg could settle European policy between them.
…The hard right’s revenge came in October 2011 when the MP David Nuttall’s motion for a referendum triggered the largest Tory postwar revolt on Europe, with 81 Eurosceptics voting against the government.
Two months later, Cameron tried to assuage his rebels by vetoing a eurozone rescue plan at an EU summit in Brussels. The clashes left Cameron isolated on both fronts…
“He’s so busy wondering how to get through the next few weeks that he could endanger Britain’s international position for the next few decades. It’s all very very risky,”…“You may be right. But what else can I do? My backbenchers are unbelievably Eurosceptic and Ukip are breathing down my neck.” After a long buildup, Cameron finally made his referendum pledge in 2013…
Three years ago, in a comment on Cameron’s referendum pledge in the Bloomberg speech, Tony Blair likened it to a comedy western of the 1970s. “It reminds me a bit of the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles where the sheriff says at one point as he holds a gun to his own head: ‘If you don’t do what I want I’ll blow my brains out,’” Blair warned. This week, Cameron has done just that.

Brexit leaves Greece dangling precariously via @MacroPolis_gr by @NickMalkoutzis | @LSEEurocrisis
…Overall, the International Monetary Fund sees the spillover effect from a Brexit on the Greek economy at close to 0.5 percent of GDP under the adverse scenario. For many eurozone economies this may seem like a rounding error but for Greece, which is in line for a 0.3 percent of GDP contraction this year, it could be enough to derail its attempts to meet the fiscal targets in its adjustment programme…

A message to the LSE community after the EU Referendum result | @LSEnews

A message to the LSE community after #EURef result from LSE Director @craigjcalhoun & Interim Director Julia Black | @LSEnews

Kevin Featherstone “There has rarely been a more interesting or important time to study Europe” | @LSEEI

Impact of Brexit – #HigherEd & Research? See @annecorb LSE Commission report | @LSEEI
‘Remain’ reflects the sector’s concerns, ‘leave’ sets out to appeal to those who want the big picture, not the detail… ‘Leave’ has not made a plausible case…

LSE Commission report @IainBeggLSE – Economic Impact of Brexit | @LSEEI
projections

Brexit Analysis No.8 #BrexitOrNot BREXIT 2016: Policy Analysis from the Centre for Economic Performance @CEP_LSE

Brexit Analysis No.7 @CEP_LSE Who Bears the Pain? How the costs of Brexit would be distributed across income groups
costs/pain

Brexit Analysis No.6 ‘ECONOMISTS FOR BREXIT’: A critique from @CEP_LSE
critique

Brexit Analysis No.5 @CEP_LSE Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK
immigration

Brexit Analysis No.4 UK Treasury analysis of ‘long-term economic impact of EU membership+alternatives’: @CEP_LSE
long-run costs

Brexit Analysis No.3 @CEP_LSE The impact of Brexit on foreign investment in the UK
FDI

Brexit Analysis No.2 @CEP_LSE The consequences of Brexit for UK trade and living standards
trade/living

Brexit Analysis No.1 @CEP_LSE Life after Brexit : What are the UK’s options outside the European Union?
options

#VoteRemain? Not sure? Help is at hand! BREXIT 2016: Policy Analysis from @CEP_LSE @swatdhingraLSE @johnvanreenen +
PDF: include the above No.1-8.

Scenarios of a new UK-EU relationship [w PDF]: A ‘soft’ Brexit, by @swatdhingraLSE | @LSEEcon
… Just from the channel of reduced trade, the effects of Brexit would be equivalent to a fall in British income of between 1.3% and 2.6%. And once we include back of the envelope calculations for the long-run effects of Brexit on productivity, the decline in income increases to between 6.3% and 9.5%. Some of these losses can
be reduced by future trade and investment arrangements with the EU after a soft Brexit. But the possible political or economic benefits of Brexit, such as better regulation, would have to be very large to fully outweigh such losses.

Foreign investors love Britain – but Brexit would end the affair | @LSEpoliticsblog
… There are at least three reasons:
First, being fully in the single market makes the UK an attractive export platform for multinationals as they do not face the potentially large costs from tariff and non-tariff barriers when exporting to the rest of the EU.
Second, multinationals have complex supply chains and many co-ordination costs between their headquarters and local branches. These would become more difficult to manage if the UK left the EU.
Third, uncertainty over the shape of the future trade arrangements between the UK and EU would also tend to dampen FDI. …

What Brexit might do to the British economy @swatdhingraLSE via @NewsHour on @YouTube | @CEP_LSE

@swatdhingraLSE says Brexit could damage the UK-India trade relationship | @The_IGC

UK areas with stagnant wages are most anti-EU @s_machin_ via @FT | @CEP_LSE

The Great Pushback: Western Politics and Dynamics of Exclusion | @LSEEurocrisis

Britain riding the tectonic plates via @openDemocracy| @LSEEurocrisis

EU referendum: economic message lost on voters @TheIFS @CEP_LSE @NIESRorg | @ESRCpress

‘This result should not come as a shock’ @sarahobolt @LSEEI | @lsebrexitvote
…We also know that referendums are highly unpredictable, and that voters often vote against proposals put to them by the government and supported by mainstream political parties and experts. …
… One reason why referendum outcomes are particularly unpredictable is that they present ordinary citizens with an opportunity to “stick it” to the political establishment. A division found in many referendums, including this one, is thus one between “the ordinary people” and “the elite”. This populist argument was successfully exploited by the Leave camp who portrayed the referendum as a chance for ordinary citizens to “take back control” from the elites in Brussels. …

Why I hope the UK will decide to Remain in the EU. My latest #EUref blog @LSEEuroppblog. | @DanMulhall
…a UK exit from the EU carries many risks – for Ireland, for our relations with the UK, for North-South ties in Ireland and for Europe. The current open border between North and South in Ireland could not be guaranteed to continue unchanged in a post-Brexit scenario. In the event of the UK leaving, we would also miss the productive partnership we have developed within the EU, where our two countries have discovered that we have very similar approaches to many of the issues on the EU policy agenda…

“Why Britain could have a great future outside a broken EU” via @MailOnline | @LSEEurocrisis
… Or take Italy, a country with an economy roughly comparable in size to our own. Its growth rate over the past eight years has been just 3 per cent. In the same period, free from the shackles of the euro, Britain has grown 35 per cent.
… We needn’t look far for the explanation. For not only is the euro destroying livelihoods, but the madness that is the free movement of peoples has brought waves of migrants sweeping across Europe, depressing wages, putting immense strain on housing and public services, undermining our security against criminals and terrorists — and making communities fear for their traditional ways of life.

Is the EU really run by unelected bureaucrats? by @simonjhix via @LSEEuroppblog | @LSEEurocrisis
…the Commission President and the individual Commissioners are not directly elected by the peoples of Europe.
First, the Commission’s power to propose legislation is much weaker than it at first seems… A Commission proposal only becomes law if it is approved by both a qualified-majority in the EU Council (unanimity in many sensitive areas) and a simple majority in the European Parliament…
Second, the Commission President and the Commissioners are indirectly elected. Under Article 17 of the EU treaty, as amended by the Lisbon Treaty, the Commission President is formally proposed by the European Council (the 28 heads of government of the EU member states), by a qualified-majority vote, and is then ‘elected’ by a majority vote in the European Parliament…
Then, once the Commission President is chosen, each EU member state nominates a Commissioner, and each Commissioner is then subject to a hearing in one of the committees of the European Parliament. If a committee issues a ‘negative opinion’ the candidate is usually withdrawn by the government concerned. After the hearings, the team of 28 is then subject to an up/down ‘investiture vote’ by a simple majority of the MEPs. …

New EU referendum polls suggest Remain is taking back the lead | @LSEEurocrisis

UK economy would be seriously weakened by Brexit, by Prof Nick Stern via @telebusiness @STICERD_LSE | @LSEEcon

Brexit: should the UK stay or walk away? Thomas Sampson interviewed by Radio New Zealand about the EU Referendum | @LSEEcon

Reading News With Economists: EU Referendum – Dr Thomas Sampson. By @EquiEcon | @LSEEcon

The ‘Britain Alone’ scenario: CEP@LSE’s critique of ‘Economists for Brexit’ | @LSEEuroppblog

Why Britain’s #EUref poses a challenge for the Labour Party. My piece in tomorrow’s @guardian | @GoodwinMJ

Left wingers for Brexit need to wake up to what they’re about to do via @ConversationUK | @LSEEurocrisis

UKIP’s ‘unethical’ anti-immigration poster @AJEnglish | @LSEEurocrisis

Le Pen hails Brexit victory and calls for referendum on EU in France | @LSEEuroppblog

Damaging consequences of Brexit: directors of three top economic research institutes in agreement, @LSEpoliticsblog | @econromesh

Brexit 2016 blogs: Comment+analysis by @CEP_LSE academics concerning the Referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU

Mervyn King talks to MoneyWeek about the EU referendum, monetary policy, & the IMF | @LSEEcon

In Feb 2015, a panel of @LSELaw experts discussed ‘Leaving the EU?’ | @LSELaw


UK Vol.49 (Post-EUref tweets Vol.2)

Here is just a part of (analytical) tweets concerning the Brexit through early AM 28 June (BST). Excerpts are on our own.

CELS Director @ProfKAArmstrong analysis of Brexit quoted in @POLITICOEurope piece on what happens next | @EULegalStudies
“The Vote Leave Framework for a New UK-EU Deal: Analysis” [PDF] | @ProfKAArmstrong
… The clear conclusion is that Article 50 TEU is the correct legal basis for the conduct of a withdrawal process and neither the experience of Greenland nor the Vienna Convention casts any doubt on that conclusion.
… The result may be something closer to the Swiss model with a withdrawal treaty acting as the basis for a free trade agreement with the arrangement supplemented where necessary by more sectoral agreements over time. But this may not correspond with the preferences of the other parties. …

@ProfKAArmstrong: Here’s my explanation for why Vote Leave Brexit roadmap implausible&… | @CUP_Law

Is a snap general election possible under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act? | @ProfMarkElliott
…two circumstances in which an early, or snap, election can be held. First, the Commons can deliberately trigger an early election if MPs representing two-thirds of all seats in the House support a motion in favour of an early election… Second, an early election is triggered under the Act if — on a simple majority — the Commons passes a motion that it “has no confidence” in the Government and then fails, within 14 days, to pass a motion saying that it does have confidence in the Government. …
…the referendum – legally speaking – was purely advisory. The legislation that allowed the referendum to take place did not invest the outcome of the referendum with any sort of legal effect. The UK Government is therefore not legally obliged by the referendum to trigger the Article 50 process. …

Can the EU force the UK to trigger the two-year Brexit process? | @ProfMarkElliott
… David Cameron clearly envisaged in his referendum statement that negotiations with the EU would not formally begin until his successor was in place in the autumn.
… two fundamental points about Article 50… The first is that Article 50 is wholly irrelevant unless and until a Member State has made a decision in accordance with its own constitutional arrangements to leave the EU. The second point is that once such a decision has been taken there is an obligation to notify the EU at which point the departing Member State loses control of the timetable: exit is (unless the EU agrees otherwise) irrevocably set for two years from the date of the notification. …

Here’s the full collection of my posts so far on the constitutional implications of Brexit | @ProfMarkElliott

EU Law Analysis: What next after the UK vote to leave the EU? | @mwgehring, Esq
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in detail
shorter
Article 50 is ‘only credible way’ for Brexit | @ProfKAArmstrong

Many thanks for underlining that Parliament must now play a much greater role in EU matters | @mwgehring, Esq

“Rather than leave the EU, the UK should confront its real problem: neo-liberalism gone too far” – do you agree? | Prof Vivien A. Schmidt @CambridgeUP
… As for the EU, don’t just blame Germany’s home grown neo-liberalism (ordo-liberalism) for the austerity-based macroeconomic policies that have generated slower growth for the Eurozone as a whole, let alone the tragedy of the Greek (non) bailout.  Why not recognize that the UK has had a hand in how the EU has developed.  As an integral partner in EU decision-making, British governments regularly approved EU policies in the Council, including the austerity policies for all of the EU. Moreover…

New maps from @geoviews give an interesting perspective on incresingly divided Britain | @oxsocsci

Brexit: “A bewildering act of self-harm” | Prof Sarah Harper @oxford_ageing
…three factors have emerged which are of real concern to the scientific endeavours we pursue here at the Institute of Population Ageing.
1. The complete public misunderstanding of the net contribution made by migrants to the UK – further inflamed by the press.
2. The skewed voting behaviour along age and income lines.
3. The concerning and ongoing lack of public understanding of scientific and other expert evidence – evidence seemingly ridiculed at every opportunity by some politicians.

“Brexit Negotiation Games” by Prof Horst Eidenmüller from @OxfordLawFac | @OxfordBLB
… Following such notification, a ‘withdrawal agreement’ shall be negotiated between the Council (of the European Union) and the respective Member State.  The agreement shall also set out the future relationship of that State with the Union.  It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.  ‘The Treaties [TEU and TFEU] shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in [Art 50(2)], unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period’ (Art 50(3)).  For the purposes of these provisions, the UK shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council representing it or in decisions concerning it (Art 50(4)).  A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Art 238(3)(b) TFEU.  Such majority requires at least 72% of the members of the Council representing the participating Member States, comprising at least 65 % of the population of these States.  At least 72% of 27 Member States (without the UK) means at least 19 Member States.  Germany’s population comprises 18.30%, France’s 14.97%, Italy’s 13.70%, Spain’s 10.47%, and Poland’s 8.57% of these 27 Member States.  No agreement can be concluded against the vote of Germany and France and any one of these three other Member States acting together. …

“one long exercise in damage limitation” – how will Brexit be negotiated? | @Politics_Oxford

Read up on the legal impact of Brexit | @OUPPolitics

Brexit as a message that politics can be about change; Prof @cjbickerton argues the case from the left, via @guardian | @OUPPolitics
… A UK exit from the EU would reveal how little of our politics is determined by what goes on in Brussels. Take immigration. I don’t believe immigration numbers will fall after Brexit. High rates of immigration into Britain are driven by a British growth model that favours expanding the labour force in place of more intensive forms of growth aimed at boosting productivity. Were the UK to leave the EU, this growth model would persist though the origins of immigrants may change.
The crucial difference is that politicians could no longer blame high rates of immigration on the EU. We would have to confront it as being at the centre of the British economic model and decide whether this is a model we want to keep. There is a world of difference between thinking of immigration as something foisted on to the UK by distant Brussels bureaucrats or as the result of a choice about how this country grows and creates wealth. The latter can only come with Brexit. …

Uncertainty abounds; Why markets are reacting negatively to news of Brexit via @TheEconomist | @OUPEconomics
… Investors hate uncertainty and the result of the referendum gives rise to a surfeit of it. But the falls in Asia’s equity markets are also in large part an early judgment about the impact on the world economy. … A recession in Britain nevertheless seems likely. Corporate investment will be hurt by uncertainty about future access to both the single market and to other places where Britain has piggybacked on trade deals negotiated by the EU. In unsettled times, businesses defer whatever spending they can. …

Brexit – how did this happen? 8 reasons for the success of the Leave campaign via @BBCNews | @OUPEconomics
… 4. Public stop listening to PM
David Cameron may have won one leadership contest, one (or two if you include the 2010 coalition-forming one) general elections and two referendums in the past ten years but this was the moment his luck ran out. …

Why did voters ignore the warnings of economists over Brexit? A case of identity trumping economics? via @TheEconomist | @OUPEconomics
… Accordingly, the Leave side promised supporters both a thriving economy and control over immigration. But Britons cannot have that outcome just by voting for it. If they want access to the EU’s single market and to enjoy the wealth it brings, they will have to accept free movement of people. If Britain rejects free movement, it will have to pay the price of being excluded from the single market. The country must pick between curbing migration and maximising wealth. … We believe that he or she should opt for a Norwegian-style deal that gives full access to the world’s biggest single market, but maintains the principle of the free movement of people. The reason is that this would maximise prosperity. And the supposed cost—migration—is actually beneficial, as Leave campaigners themselves have said. …

‘It is not hard to see why Leave won’ says @StephenDFisher @SociologyOxford #EURefResults | @oxsocsci

‘Brexit’ Talk on Social Media Favored the ‘Leave’ Side – JOHN HERRMAN via NYTimes | @OxfordQstep

“Now that the referendum is over, we can start the process that will leave elites more responsive to the public” Chris Baker | @OxPolBlog

Brexit and Political Education: Ariadne’s Thread Leads to Leave: An impressive list of academics, including s… | @Politics_Oxford

From the role of social media to immigration, six Oxford academics share their views on the #EURefResults @Medium | @UniofOxford

John Curtice of @NatCen on how the polls got it wrong again | @NuffieldLibrary

“Europe has lost trust, imagination and sex appeal” | @OxPolBlog

In light of Brexit Professor @SandraFredman calls for a re-commitment to the equality rights of every human being | @OxHRH

Read our latest blog Prof @RGWhitman talking about ‘The EEA: A safe harbour in the Brexit storm’ | @UKandEU

‘The Referendum Conundrum: Referenda or Referendums?’ [w PDF] | @CUP_PoliSci

Our Chief Executive, Peter Phillips, has issued a statement on the #EURefResults | @CambridgeUP

Here is the @UniofOxford statement on the #EURefResults | @OxHumanities

EUref vote by GE2015 vote shows how Europe splits traditional L-R parties in half; major party realignment ahead | @nikkon7

‘Remain’ or ‘leave’, learn more about Britain’s turbulent relationship with the EU in Continental Drift | @cambUP_History

Interesting to revisit @VivianeRedingEU speaking at @EULegalStudies MSL on UK & EU ‘Inevitably Drifting Apart?’ [Video] | @cambridgelaw

Browse our Europe reading list on the OUPblog for exclusive content | @alexguyver @OUPEconomics

While some come from the EU, and some are domestic, employment laws can often be a mixture of the two | @OUPAcademic

“The EU seeks not to replace States, but rather to achieve a better management of their interdependence” | Prof Stephen Weatherill @OUPAcademic
…It is a pernicious misrepresentation of the role of the EU. ‘Control’ is an illusion in a world of economic interdependence: unilateral State action lacks the necessary vigour to tackle the major problems that citizens expect to be addressed – climate change, economic reform, security, migration, and so on. States need to co-operate. That is what the EU is for. …

What will Brexit mean for the UK economy? @keithbreene via @wef | @OUPEconomics

UKvote won’t solve the pressure on social services in UK, this is the result of self-imposed austerity not of EU migration @cozzi1977 | @OUPEconomics

Remember Nick Clegg? This prophetic article he wrote on 22 June makes me think we’ll hear a lot more from him soon. | @SarmientoMir

What has the USA historically thought about the political union of western Europe? Does it matter? | @ContEuroHistory


UK Vol.48 (Post-EUref tweets)

Here is just a part of tweets concerning the Brexit from 24 to early AM 26 June (BST). Hope this sort of tiny database which has consequently arisen from our rough, limited-time, kind of fixed-point observation – harmless, of course – would be useful for all the people’s further understanding of the current situation.

For the first time since World War II, Western nationalism has beaten globalism in a major way | @voxdotcom

5 years after Brexit there will be no UK, others will have left EU, & the “special relationship” will be no more | @RichardHaass

@evanHD isn’t happy with this potential change of tone on freedom of movement | @BBCNewsnight

Four things Brexit campaigners have already u-turned | @Independent

Brexit is an opportunity for offshore buyers to snap up high-end properties at bargain price | @Forbes

17 experts on how Brexit will change the world | @politico

Analysis: “Brexit” unravels EU’s dream | @USATODAY

Brexit and the End of International Progressive Inevitability | @NRO

The British pound hit a 30-year low. Thanks to Brexit, the U.K. just went on sale. | @TravelLeisure

Brexit: expect a new prime minister, volatile markets and years of costly uncertainty | @TheEconomist

Why those who really wanted Brexit may soon regret it | @TorontoStar

Bitcoin saw a 4% increase after Brexit | @Forbes

Why Brexit might never happen | @Slate

These are the 6 biggest consequences to the Brexit vote so far | @TIME

@TurnbullMalcolm warns Australians to ‘expect the unexpected’ in the wake of Brexit | @abcnews

Investor George Soros calls for reconstruction of EU after ‘Brexit’ vote | @Reuters

This 1980 clip from ‘Yes Minister’ basically explains Brexit | @HuffPostUKCom

Mapped: Brexit’s economic aftermath | @ForeignPolicy

What Brexit might do to the British economy. @hari talks with prof. @swatdhingraLSE @LSEnews | @KCTS9

Brexit strips world’s 400 richest people of $127bn – Bloomberg | @RT_com

Instead of addressing their fundamental flaws, elites devote their energy to demonizing victims of their corruption | @theintercept

Here’s why British scientists are so opposed to Brexit | @techreview

Gold hits 2-year high after Brexit vote – and the fallout will only bring more gains | @business

Central banks ready to cooperate after Brexit result | @Reuters

Starved of resources, UK’s most deprived town pins hopes on Brexit | @Reuters

“Bracksies”: how Brexit could wind up not actually happening | @voxdotcom

Signs suggest warnings of Brexit upheaval could prove true | @nytimes

EU names Belgian to coordinate Brexit negotiations | @Reuters

How many Americans knew what Brexit was the first time they were asked about it? I haven’t encountered one. | @piersmorgan

Gary Johnson praises Brexit decision: UK is rejecting “crony capitalism” | @thehill

The Brexit is inspiring independence movements from Catalonia to Texas | @vicenews

Brexit: Environmentalists fear ‘bonfire’ of regulations | @wwwfoecouk

How the Brexit vote jeopardizes the future for UK scientists | @verge

Ricky Gervais has had his say on Brexit, and it’s bleak | @Independent

@GovMikeHuckabee: “When people say ‘diversity’ what they mean is uniformity.” | @FoxNews

What Brexit can teach us about the psychology of fear | @voxdotcom

Banks prepare to move thousands of jobs out of UK after Brexit vote | @thetimes

Belfast post office runs out of Irish passport application forms | @Independent_ie

Millennials blame older generations for Brexit, but whose fault is it really? | @vicenews

WATCH: @realDonaldTrump to @TomLlamasABC: Clinton “embarrassed” to talk Brexit on camera | @ABCPolitics

Brexit was fueled by irrational xenophobia, not real economic grievances | @voxdotcom

Brexit is good news says President of Iceland | @igeldard

Welsh Muslim told to ‘pack bags and go home’ after vote for Brexit | @Independent

Brexit has exposed the chasm between the Establishment… and the rest of us, writes Jeremy Paxman | @Telegraph

Bill Maher challenges Brexit “xenophobia” claims, harshly calls out liberal when he compares GOP to British Muslims | @theblaze

Post-Brexit world: Financial downturn, political turmoil & protests (LIVE UPDATES) | @RT_com

Here’s a demographic breakdown of who voted for the Brexit | @TheAtlantic

What Brexit supporters want is impossible, argues @Arturo_Sarukhan. Here’s why | @BrookingsInst

Putin on Brexit: ‘It’s comprehensible, no one wants to feed & subsidize weak economies’ | @RT_com

Why Brexit will raise trade barriers | @WSJ

Wow: Famed economist says Brexit signals THIS candidate will be President… | @AllenWest

The EU’s disintegration may now be inevitable, but that is no reason to give up, says @georgesoros | @ProSyn

Several bidders ‘close to abandoning Tata Steel takeover talks’ following Brexit result | @SWEveningPost

Brexit has exposed the chasm between the Establishment… and the rest of us | @TelePolitics

“The older generation have dug a grave for us”. These young Remain supporters gather for an anti-Brexit rally. | @Channel4News

Andrew Castle tears into ‘arrogant’ Jean-Claude Juncker over his response to brexit | @LBC

After Brexit: Germany and France May Begin to Follow Their Pro-Russian Instincts | @RussiaInsider

Scores of anti-Brexit protesters descend on Parliament Square | @standardnews

Let’s get this over with: Founding EU members want quick divorce from UK | @RT_com

For the U.S., Britain’s vote may be a warning of the limits of globalization | @nytimes

“Brexit is just the beginning of a popular revolt against elites” via @MKTWDelamaide | @MarketWatch

Brexit: the world’s most complex divorce is about to begin. Here’s how it might proceed | @FT

The day after Brexit – From petitions to acceptance @WasHasNaz has the reactions for you | @dwnews

Everyone can agree Brexit must be met with reform. But that word masks contradictory ideas | @TheEconomist

@PJHarveyUK reacts to Brexit vote in mid-concert speech | @pitchfork

Gold wins from Brexit. But other commodities lose | @TheEconomist

Shares down, jobs down, prices up? Business comes to terms with Brexit | @guardian

Why this Brexit market panic is a screaming buy for stock investors | @MarketWatch

What will Brexit mean for immigration? | @FT

These are the media’s best Brexit covers | @TIME

Brexit live: EU calls for new British PM in ‘days’ | @FT

Can Brexit be overturned? | @business

Trade and tourism will suffer most in these 6 EU nations because of Brexit | @business

The Americans’ guide to understanding Brexit: your questions answered | @guardian

Cornwall Council has asked for urgent guarantees over the €500m earmarked for the county from EU aid after Brexit | @itvwestcountry

Brexit explained for wrestling fans | @KayfabeNews

The Brexit crisis is a huge blow to Obama’s legacy | @businessinsider

Confused about the Brexit? We’ve got a cheat sheet | @latimes

Brexit was a harsh political awakening for young people, says @laraprendergast | @spectator

Investment banks are approaching regulators to secure licences and lining up executives to relocate after Brexit | @FT

“The Day After” Brilliant article on Brexit by JDiEM25er James K. Galbraith | @yanisvaroufakis

So, this happened. Brexit has the Tolerance Mob going after … Right Said Fred | @CR

The Brexit is happening. Here’s what that means for travelers | @CNTraveler

Nom nom nom. The delicious double standards (and tasty tears!) of the progressive establishment. | @BreitbartNews

A historical perspective on Friday’s Brexit vote | @HarvardBiz

Why the U.S. is freaked out about Brexit too | @cnni

Brexit a lesson for Trudeau to listen to average people | @Polkameister

Merkel: there is no need to be “nasty” during talks to discuss Britain’s exit from the EU | @SkyNews

Brexit stands as a warning to American conservatives | @guardian

The next dominoes to fall | @BreitbartNews

The struggle between nationalism and global leadership. Sir Harold Evans on Brexit. | @Reuters

The Brexit crisis is really an opportunity to create a better society – Jenny Jones | @guardian

Brexit inspires Dutch and French anti-immigrant, Islamophobic groups to seek referendums | @AJENews

Brexit: ‘I am gravely concerned. And you should be, too.’ @webbmedia | @Inc

Another group concerned about the impact of the Brexit: British scientists | @latimes

OPINION: Former MI6 spy on why Brexit makes America safer – @fxnopinion | @FoxNews

Newspapers around the world have their say on Brexit: “Anarachy in the UK” and “Brefugees welcome” are a selection | @Channel4News

EU chiefs: Brexit is “not an amicable divorce but it was also not an intimate love affair.” | @AJENews

Obama loses reliable partner, faces uncertainty after Brexit, report @joshledermanAP and @khennessey | @AP_Politics

Brexit: A very British revolution – a cry for liberty and a rebuke to the establishment by @FraserNelson via @WSJ | @BetterOffOut

What is Article 50 and why is it so central to the Brexit debate? | @guardian

Why Wales voted for Brexit | @Independent

.
A divided country: how and why Britain voted for Brexit | @Channel4News

Brexit: How The Oldies of Britian Stole The Younger Generation’s Future | @TheAffinityMag

The areas and demographics where the Brexit vote was won | @guardian

Brexit: people voted according to education, income and age | @FT

EU Referendum | @BBCBreaking

‘I’m full of regret’: extraordinary moment Brexit voter changes her mind | @Telegraph

Demographics, markets and migration: charting Brexit | @TheEconomist

What just happened? A Brexit explainer | @wef

Why the polls and social media got Brexit wrong | @Forbes

Brexit Is ‘The 1989 of This Generation’ | @V_of_Europe

The seven stages of Brexit grief, explained | @Independent

‘Brexit is an Eton Wall Game where poorest are put up against the wall and shot’ | @MirrorPolitics

Londoners sign petition for metropolis to stay in EU, Mayor Khan says city must have a say in Brexit negotiations | @AFP

Boris Johnson says Britain will continue to be a great European power | @rtenews

Brexit aftermath – in pictures | @guardian

Sky didn’t fall today, there is no global systemic crisis, but UK & EU both handling nitroglycerin… | @AmbroseEP

Why Brexit was a great idea | @NRO

Here’s how the Brexit will actually work | @ndtv

Brexit is terrifying — and no, not because of the economics | @voxdotcom

The seven stages of Brexit grief | @Independent

Opinion: After Brexit it’s clear: to save liberal democracy, politicians will have to reform capitalism | @FT

‘Why upset the apple cart?’ asks a farmer after Brexit | @guardian

Brexit: What we know and what we don’t know | @CBSNews

So the Brexit happened. Now what?  | @vicenews

What does Brexit mean to the world economy? The Economist: It’s grim | @ProPublica

UK votes to leave EU — what this might mean for the markets & your portfolio | @MerrillLynch

Excellent postmortem by @AnthonyBarnett. He had seen it coming! Blimey, it is Brexit! | @yanisvaroufakis

The post-Brexit financial world remains deeply uncertain | @guardian

Why Brexit is so bad for the economy | @TheAtlantic

Brits are still trying to figure out what Brexit is after voting for it | @ComplexMag

You don’t need to be an expert to understand this Brexit graph. Latest developments here | @BBCBusiness

After Brexit: The System Cannot Hold | @zerohedge

Diplomats from EU’s founding 6 nations are meeting in Berlin to discuss UK’s exit from bloc | @AP

Brexit FAQs: What happens next? | @TheAtlantic

For the latest on the fallout from the Brexit vote, FF our colleagues from @POLITICOEurope | @politico

What will happen now to the real-estate markets in the U.K.? | @WSJ

Thousands Of British Refugees Make Dangerous Journey Across The Irish | @WhispersNewsLTD

The pro-Brexit message resonated with those who feel left behind | @FT

With Brexit, the British people have … lost a lot of credibility, writes @djrothkopf | @ForeignPolicy

The small but real possibility that Brexit won’t ever happen | @Slate

What impact would Brexit have on the EU? | @wef

‘Clueless?’ UK citizens google ‘What’s EU?’ after Brexit | @RT_com

Will the Brexit vote prompt a second Scottish independence referendum? | @SkyNews

Scotland is likely to seek independence from the UK (again) after the Brexit vote | @CNN

Germany and France struggle to hold EU center as Brexit storm blows | @business

It feels like the beginning of the end”: Germans react to Brexit vote | @dw_business

Domino Effect: Brexit May Trigger Referendums in Italy and Netherlands | @V_of_Europe

Spain and Italy bear brunt of Brexit stress | @fastFT

After Brexit, could there be Grexit? | @AJEnglish

France fears Brexit consequences for EU defense capability | @ReutersWorld

Defence secretary says he has been reassured US-UK security ties ‘will endure’ post-Brexit | @itvnews

Brexit may throw billions of pounds worth of agriculture trade into question

Trade and tourism will suffer most in these 6 EU nations because of Brexit | @business

Sarah Palin Urges the US to Leave the United Nations | @MotherJones

The aftermath of Brexit “is a defining moment for American diplomacy,” @IvoHDaalder tells @JudyWoodruff PBSnews | @NewsHour

The liberal project is increasingly an American one,   @benwallacewells writes | @NewYorker

Brexit should be a lesson to the U.S. that angry voters sometimes get their way | @BrookingsInst

After Brexit, what? U.S. secessionists hankering for ‘Texit’ | @Reuters

Want to understand Brexit? Imagine Texas leaving the United States. | @voxdotcom

Brexit Shows Betting Markets Are Not a Silver Bullet for Predicting Elections | @reason

@realDonaldTrump and @SpeakerRyan reacted very differently to Brexit | @politico

What Brexit means for the U.S. presidential election | @TIME

Brexit is like waking up with @realDonaldTrump as president | @ComplexMagLife

Obama responds to Brexit: “…yesterday’s vote raises challenges posed by globalization.” | @Forbes

In Dublin speech, @VP Biden responds to BrexitVote & rise of Trump w/ words of caution on “reactionary politicians” | @CBSEveningNews

Hannity: The British ‘Showed Obama Their Middle Finger’ With Brexit | @DailyCaller

Sharing my take on Brexit vote live on @facebook now | @newtgingrich

British anti-immigration leader says Brexit is Obama’s fault | @thehill

People are figuring out ways to blame Obama for Brexit, because of course they are | @Slate

Brexit creates a lonely new American exceptionalism, @benwallacewells writes | @NewYorker

Why Brexit is likely to be one of the most consequential events for the world since the end of the Cold War | @HarvardBiz

Paul Krugman on Brexit: “Well, that was pretty awesome – and I mean that in the worst way” via @NYTOpinion | @nytimes

“To see Britain reject its neighbors in this way is profoundly depressing.” | @HarvardBiz

Brexit: the world’s most complex divorce is about to begin. Here’s how it might proceed | @FT

How to navigate Brexit volatility | @PIMCO

Here’s what economists and analysts are saying about the Brexit vote via @WSJEcon | @WSJ

How Brexit will affect the global economy: right now, in a little while, and long term | @nytimes

What are the business and financial ramifications of Brexit for the rest of the EU? @FTI_EMEA | @FTI_SC

Why British firms will not rush to judgment on Brexit | @TheEconomist

Banks around the world deploy their Brexit contingency plans. Should you worry? | @TheStreet

Here’s the Brexit memo Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein sent to staff | @businessinsider

@ABC News Special Report: Stock market tumbles in aftermath of Brexit

Japanese auto companies and a Hong Kong tycoon are among those hurt by “Brexit” vote | @WSJ

There is no reason why nations committed to entrepreneurship & free trade can’t prosper outside of the EU | @CatoInstitute

44% of the UK’s exports go to the EU. Now, we don’t know what that trade will look like via @business | @FiveThirtyEight

GOT IT WRONG: Pollsters, Pundits, Historians, Financiers… | @DRUDGE_REPORT

Brexit: One thing is more clear than ever — we must keep demanding that leaders everywhere ActOnClimate | @ClimateReality

How can we make Brexit work for the environment? – Craig Bennett | @guardianeco

Law firms are positioning themselves to make some cash after Brexit via @WSJLawBlog | @WSJ

Credit rating agency Moody’s cuts UK outlook from stable to negative after Brexit | @BBCBreaking

US high yield bond market adjusting to Brexit, with large gaps lower | @Forbes

The Brexit could have wide implications for the U.S. economy | @CNN

4 ways Brexit could hurt the U.S. economy | @CNNMoney

Here’s what Brexit means for American travelers | @TravelLeisure

These trades are the winners and losers from the Brexit vote shock | @business

Japanese companies are getting a surprise bargain out of Brexit | @business

@ABC Special Report: Stock market tumbles; Dow closes down over 600 points after Brexit.

8 things you need to know about Brexit | @CNNMoney

The giant hedge fund that got Brexit right via @WSJMarkets | @WSJ

Alan Greenspan on Brexit | @MarketWatch

Global stocks tumble after Brexit decision | @TIME

The 2nd richest man in the world lost $4.4B overnight due to market response to Brexit | @Forbes

An expert sums up the economic consensus about Brexit | @voxdotcom

Overwhelmed by Brexit? Here are the basics | @nytimes

Three reasons Americans should care about the Brexit | @latimes

What to watch for in the markets after the Brexit shock | @nytimes

Brexit sent stocks sliding around the globe. The S&P 500 closed at 2,037.35 | @markets

BrexitVote: The Dow closed with its largest drop since August 2015 | @Variety

BrexitVote could affect Americans’ 401(k) plans, mortgages, personal businesses, vacation plans | @ABC7

What UK startups make of the shock Brexit vote by @riptari | @TechCrunch

Here’s what Brexit means for the tech industry | @TIME

British tech firms eye relocation after Brexit vote | @guardian

Why British scientists are freaking out about Brexit | @Gizmodo

Brexit big blow to UK science | @guardian

Scientific community worries that Brexit will mean loss of funding, talent, business and collaboration. @sciam | @michikokakutani

Academics are uniting in bewilderment at Brexit | @Independent

Cornwall voted for Brexit, and now wants to keep its EU funding | @anneapplebaum

Brexit is ‘terrible news for TV and film’ | @Independent

They couldn’t keep you in the dark | @BreitbartNews

HBO says Brexit won’t impact production on ‘Game of Thrones’ | @TIME

Arts hit back at Brexit: ‘I feel nothing but rage’ | @guardian

What Brexit means for the fashion industry | @ELLEmagazine

The British passport has lost a lot of its value already | @Independent

Brexit forces British expats to become FRENCH because they’re so scared of being sent home | @DailyMailUK

The 10 best places to emigrate to after Brexit | @Independent

How immigration fueled Brexit | @TheNatlInterest

Pro-Brexit politicians are the dog that caught the car. Now immigration is their problem. | @voxdotcom

How will EU migrant workers be affected by Brexit? Via @AlannaPetroff | @CNNMoney

Scapegoating immigrants for economic suffering is easier than confronting austerity | @thenation

So who are the winners from Brexit? | @guardian

Brexit Created Many Losers, But Some Winners Too | @NPR

Brexit was sold as a victory for the working class. It isn’t. | @thinkprogress

How the pied pipers of Brexit cheated the poor and how they might be stopped – excellent by Matthew Parris | @JasonCowleyNS

Actually, the ones most out of touch were the ones who didn’t see Brexit coming | @IngrahamAngle

Brexit could cause UK charities to lose over $200 million every year | @HuffingtonPost

Celebs on Brexit: “We had a headache, so we shot our foot off. Now we can’t walk, and we still have the headache.” | @Salon

Media stocks tank in US after Brexit vote | @THR

Hozier calls Brexit a “massive betrayal”: “My heart breaks” | @billboard

On the eve of Brexit, Elton John welcomed luminaries into his home for a more hopeful affair | @VanityFair

How Brexit could impact the creative industry | @FastCoDesign

Brexit Meets Monty Python on the New Yorker’s next cover | @FastCompany

27 Brexit tweets guaranteed to make Brits laugh, cry, or probably both | @BuzzFeedUK

30 Brexit tweets: Collection of best memes, jokes, cartoons, gifs on Twitter | @htTweets

How cartoonists around the world are reacting to Brexit | @Independent

Explaining Brexit in the best possible way—with Simpsons memes | @TheAVClub

Martin Rowson on the Brexit vote – cartoon | @guardian


UK Vol.47 (EUref (analytical) articles/podcasts: “Bremain”?/“Brexit”? Vol.2)

Here is just a part of (analytical) articles/papers/videos/podcasts concerning the Brexit/Bremain on Twitter by think tanks, et al (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States).

@IPPR @IPPRNorth

@CER_London

@iealondon

@IISS_org @harries_matthew

@ChathamHouse

@RUSI_org

@instituteforgov

@ParlStreet

@ToryReformGroup

@csjthinktank

@res_publica

@CompassOffice (@NadineElEnany)

@RussellRElliott (@CompassOffice)

@NEF

@thefabians

@ProgressOnline (@policynetwork)

@CapX

@ASI

@EuropeanFutures

@euromovescot

@reformthinktank

@ConWayFor

@bowgroup

@Civitas_UK

@NIESRorg @CEP_LSE @TheIFS

@LSEEI

@GreshamCollege (@NIESRorg)

@CFR_IIGG (@IISS_org)

(@ASPI_org)

@IRPP

@Conferenceboard

@CBoC_SPSE

@CDHoweInstitute

@AU_SIS (@MichelleEgan14 @TheWilsonCenter)

@Heritage

@CatoFP

@NRO

@theblaze

@CarnegieEndow

@AEIfdp

@AEIdeas (@DaliborRohac @Newsweek)

@HooverInst

@inthesetimesmag (@EconomicPolicy)

@TZHRJ (@EconomicPolicy)

@NormEisen (@HudsonInstitute)

@FPA_ORG

@EWInstitute

@ForeignPolicyI

@WAJournal

@WorldPolicy

@AtlanticCouncil

@NewAmerica

@RANDCorporation

@CFR_org

@CFR_org (@JohnCampbellcfr)

@ForeignPolicy

@CSIS_USLD

@BrookingsFP

[Others]

@GerryHassan

@ianmcconnellHT

@cath_haddon

@Cou_politics

@JeyyLowe

@forbritain

@NewStartMag

@wrmead

@DrAlfOldman


UK Vol.46 (EUref (academic/analytical) articles/podcasts: “Bremain”? “Brexit”? – UK’s Referendum on EU Membership)

Here is just a part of (academic/analytical) articles/papers/videos/podcasts concerning the Brexit/Bremain on Twitter: universities (the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States), think tanks (Continental Europe), et al.

[Universities]

@Cambridge_Uni

@CambridgeNewsUK

@Politics_Oxford

@UniofOxford

@LSEEcon

@ConUnit_UCL

@KingsCollegeLon

@WarwickBSchool

@DurhamLawSchool

@cranfieldmngmt

@UniOfSurrey

@UniofBathIPR

@BristolUni

Manchester @MBSnews

@unibirmingham

@UniofExeter

(@UniofNottingham)

@unisouthampton

@sheffielduni

(@UniofReading)

Leicester @UoLNewsCentre

@lancasterarts

@UniWestminster

(@Uni_of_Essex)

@SussexUni

@imperialcollege

@QMUL

(@RoyalHolloway)

(@GoldsmithsUoL)

London Business School @LBS

@UoLondon

@CityUniLondon

(@StirManSchool)

@lborouniversity

@UniKent

@BradfordUniSIS

@YorkAlumni

@uniofeastanglia

@UniofNewcastle

@UniversityLeeds

@livuninews

(@univofstandrews)

(@UofGlasgow)

@EdinburghUni

@aberdeenuni

(@dundeeuni)

@cardiffuni

(Aberystwyth @AberUni)

@QueensUBelfast

@tcddublin

UCDDublin @UCDLawSchool

@AucklandUni

(@unimelb)

Melbourne @Government_UoM

(@ANU_Law)

@ArtSS_Sydney

Toronto @UofT_PolSci

(Toronto @munkschool)

@UBCSauderSchool

@UBC

Harvard @Kennedy_School

@Harvard_Law

@YaleSOM

@YaleGlobal

@PrincetonBCF

(Princeton @WilsonSchool)

@StanfordCISAC

Stanford @SIEPR

(@MIT)

@UChicago

@UCBerkeley

[Think tanks]

@clingendael83

@EUforumnl

@DufasNL

(@EBNtweets)

@IES_Brussels

@EgmontInstitute

@robert_schuman

@BStBrussels

@IFRI_/

@epc_eu

(@FriendsofEurope)

(@sauvonsleurope)

(@InstSobieskiego)

@EuropesWorld

@esharpmag

@fleishmanEU

(@ECFRBerlin)

@SWPBerlin

@SpinelliGroup

@EuroInstituteDC

@USCC_Europe

@viEUws

@CFMUK @voxeu @cepr_org

@FTI_SC

[Others]

@William_Bain

@BIUK_Finance

@TheEconomist

@TheEconomist

@annemcelvoy @ZannyMB @TheEconomist

Roderick Abbott @wef

@plegrain @ProSyn

Harold James @ProSyn

Simon Johnson @ProSyn

@plegrain @ProSyn @CEP_LSE

@guydej1 @ECIPE


Indexes Vol.3 (London Tops the Ranking of the World’s “Smartest” Cities)