Economic Development

A special double edition of Local Economy on welfare reform and labour market activation is scheduled for publication in early August. As editor of Local Economy, I’m compelled to use every opportunity to plug the journal as hard as I can, but I’m plugging especially hard in this instance because I think it’s important to try to re-set the terms of the somewhat uninspiring debate that is currently accompanying welfare reform in this country. I hope that, in part, this can be done by comparing the UK’s welfare arrangements and reform trajectory with those in other countries, and indeed, the edition offers something of a smorgasbord of alternative versions of social protection and labour market interventions. About half of the 250 pages or so in this edition accommodate papers from the UK, but we also have articles about the USA, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Japan, and China.

For the longest time, government played a key role in the provision of public goods – bridges, roads, public education, safety regulations, etc, which served worthy public purposes.