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In The Social Market Economy Revisited, former Chairman of the SMF, Lord Skidelsky, returns to the themes of his seminal 1989 essay that marked launched the Foundation. In the wake of the biggest financial crisis in history, he examines how markets address different types of uncertainty, the role of convention in determining economic behaviour and the limits to the use of econometric analysis in forecasting the future. Read more...
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In the second of a series of essays to mark the 21st anniversary of the Social Market Foundation, John Kay looks back at the triumph of the market economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kay attributes this triumph to the role of the price mechanism, 'markets as a process of discovery', and the diffusion of political and economic power with which markets are associated. Read more...
The UK's debt crisis is mounting. This year's borrowing is likely to be bigger even than last year's record £156bn deficit. With bond markets getting jittery about sovereign debt, the coalition has one shot at cutting the unprecedented deficit. The Government's emergency budget and spending review in the coming months must not shrink from the challenge. If it fails to take decisive measures, the cost of borrowing will balloon, and ultimately much more draconian cuts and taxes will be required. It's time to act. Read more...
Discussion of enabling early access to pension saving has been a feature of UK pension policy debate for some years. However, this discussion has come into sharper focus in light of the global financial crisis, and its potential impact on the attitude of UK households to locking away saving for many years.
This report examines the evidence that current pension rules, associated with the UK ‘annuities deal', deter pension saving. The report also explores in detail the practical considerations and problems that would be confronted by the multiple ‘early access' models of pension saving that have been proposed. Read more...
Arrangements for fiscal policymaking ultimately come down to a set of choices around: who should take fiscal decisions and how? Who should carry out the projections of revenue and spending on which those decisions are based? In the UK, fiscal policymaking has traditionally been highly centralised and discretionary, with all fiscal projections and decisions emanating from HM Treasury. The self-imposed fiscal rules of the 1997 Labour government represented an important experiment in the evolution of fiscal policy institutions. The rules sought to articulate formal standards by which fiscal policymaking could be judged thereby increasing political accountability, even if the rules themselves amounted to nothing more than statements of intent. However, the fiscal crisis that confronted the UK in 2009 showed that even if the government's fiscal framework was an improvement on what went before, it clearly wasn't good enough. Read more...
This report outlines a fresh approach to national unemployment insurance, in which people can
insure themselves against loss of income due to unemployment. It builds on the conceptual
framework set out in the Social Market Foundation's earlier report Anglo-flexicurity: A safety net
for UK workers.
Despite the sustained success of the British labour market, workers feel increasingly insecure. This is partly due to the increased financial consequences of losing employment today. At present, neither the state nor the private market provides an adequate response to this. This report argues that government, in cooperation with the private sector, can and should provide a safety net for the vulnerable middle class to counteract this trend. Read more...
The Social Market and its Enemies: A new philosophy for Brown? explores the origins of the social market; how the social market view of the world has evolved since the foundation of the SMF; the enemies of the social market; and the characteristics that distinguish social marketeers. Read more...
This essay argues that those who benefit from globalisation need to contribute much more positively to the life chances of those who do not. If such social relations are to be expressed through government, politicians will have to undertake a significant and difficult re-evaluation of existing public institutions and spending priorities. Read more...
The New Demographics: Reshaping the world of work and retirement analyses a number of false assumptions which underlie our thinking about retirement and calls for a radical overhaul of employment and leadership models that will allow people to continue working past retirement age. Read more...
This publication examines the next steps in modernising public sector pay. A major finding of the paper is that greater equity of service provision will rely on increased local variation in public sector pay within a national pay bargaining framework. Private firms with large numbers of outlets have sophisticated gradations of regional pay. The public sector should adopt a similar model if London and the South East are to avoid a serious shortage of key public sector workers. Read more...
This publication is a result of a seminar held in December 2006, which brought together some of the most important minds from within the sector to discuss whether a sustainable responsible lending policy is required in response to the difficulties over personal debt. Read more...
In this paper, the Social Market Foundation’s first publication from 1989, Robert Sidelsky discusses the use of the phrase ‘social market economy’. It signifies a choice in favour of the market economy. The author stated that it means we turn to the market as a first resort and the government as a last resort, not the other way round. Read more...
This paper outlines the findings of an SMF seminar, held in July 2003, and includes a restatement of the presentations given, a summary of the main points that emerged from discussion, and an attempt to draw all of this together to make some tentative conclusions. Read more...
The growth of regulation in Britain since the 1980s has been haphazard but immense, spawning a profession of its own. Criticisms about costs and excessive ‘red tape’ are familiar. However, recently, broader concerns have been expressed about service failures, particularly in railways and energy networks. Read more...