Many readers will be familiar with the concept of the Bootleggers and Baptists, in which self-interested businesses find common cause with moral busybodies in rigging the market against consumers. The ...

Pricing would lead to more efficient investment and better use of existing capacity The purpose of the Hobart Papers is to contribute a stream of authoritative, independent and readable commentary to ...

Julian Jessop will discuss the slowdown in productivity growth after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Some economists think this slowdown might be structural and long-lasting (‘secular stagnation’ ...

This article was first published on the Institute of Economic Affairs Substack. Official figures recently published by HMRC indicate a huge rise in illicit tobacco sales in the UK since 2021. The ...

The IEA is an educational charity and free market think tank. Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets ...

Each year, the Government publishes international energy price comparisons. The data is sourced from the IEA and covers industrial and domestic gas and electricity prices. The latest data for 2023 was ...

Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran ...

We are delighted to announce this year’s competition for A- Level and IB students, with a 1 st prize of £500 and £250 each for three runners up. There is also a prize of £500 for the school with the ...

Colonialism and the slave trade were, at best, minor factors in Britain’s prosperity and may have been net lossmakers. An increasingly prominent anti-capitalist narrative claims that empire and ...

As outlined in the Part 1, throughout the EU Referendum campaign, different people at the IEA took very different views on Brexit, and debated them very publicly, in the form of articles, speeches, ...

Many libertarians supported Brexit, believing it would reduce governmental layers and bring power closer to the British people. They saw it as an opportunity to escape the control of Brussels’ ...

Britain is moving in a decidedly cashless direction. In the decade between 2012 and 2022, cash payments fell from 54 per cent to 14 per cent according to UK Finance. This isn’t happening because of ...