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This thesis is a theoretical and empirical examination of the impact of New Commonwealth immigration during 1951-66 on the welfare of the indigenous population of the United Kingdom. Chapter I concentrates mainly on the pattern of New Commonwealth immigration in the post-war period and the effect of immigration laws. The experiences of the other West European countries are also briefly examined. Chapter II surveys previous theoretical analyses of the welfare implications of immigration. Chapter III surveys the empirical literature on the economic impact of immigration with particular reference to the United Kingdom and West European experience and points to the differences in approach between that of the empirical researchers and the theoretical models discussed in Chapter II. Chapter IV builds upon the work of the previous theoretical contributors and develops a framework that will enable the empirical estimation of the welfare impacts. A distinction is made between the non-traded and traded sectors, and for each of these sectors certain modifications are introduced to make the analysis more relevant for the United Kingdom experience: these include the provision of welfare services and tariffs and taxes. And finally, Chapter V presents the empirical estimates. The research suggests that immigration brought a small welfare loss for the indigenous population of the United Kingdom: the magnitudes are between 0.14 per cent and 0.24 per cent of the net output of the sectors examined. An important point revealed by the research is that the losses/gains depend on the industrial distribution of immigrant workers.

Index number is useful when the measurements are in different units, and it can be applied to different sectors of economic activity, as well as having many other applications. A main aim of this study is to construct national index numbers for both the agricultural production and ex-farm prices for agricultural production of the agriculture sector of Iraq and to evaluate these indices during the period of the study. These indices are used instead of the indices that are constructed by Central Statistical Organization of Iraq using the Laspeyres formula, to find direct index number. This index is facing some problems: 1) It cannot be used over a long period of time. 2) The list of items cannot be add or deducted from. Therefore, to avoid these problems the chain index number is used in this study. The Fisher formula is used in calculations to give results which can be maintained to be unbiased because Laspeyres formula has an upward biased result and Paasche result is downward biased. The chain Fisher index number with a moving average is employed to avoid the effects of the undetermined factors on the construction of index number. The effects of the annual temperature as one of the undetermined factors is tested. The moving average on which the construction of index number depends as weight is tested to explain the undetermined factors. The index number of production is used to find the productivity of the cultivated area for annually growing crops. The relation between the productivity, cultivated area indices, production indices and ex-farm prices is tested depending on the test hypothesis for the rank correlation coefficient for all these indicators.

This thesis uses a detailed study of industrial economic controls to examine the broader relationship between popular politics and economic policy in Britain between 1945 and 1955. Combining the personal insights of administrators with a high level intellectual history, it begins by analysing the relationship between controls and attempts to manage the economy during and after the Second World War. After tracing these developments in administration and usage, it will demonstrate that the ambiguous nature of individual controls allowed for the system as a whole to be used as a symbolic device within an intensely political debate. Indeed, far from raising entirely technical questions, it will show that controls were able to reduce complex economics into a simple form and provide a tangible link between everyday economics and potent philosophical critiques. They were, in this sense, able to symbolise both administrative inefficiencies and a rhetorical ‘choice between two ways of life’. Nevertheless, acknowledging the inherent artificiality of a debate that had imbued individual controls with an undue sense of significance, it will be argued that this discussion testified to certain shared ‘high level’ assumptions and did little to clarify confusions within the system. Thus, although the debates could be politically advantageous in the short term, it will be shown that they made little difference to the actual mechanisms of control and served to entrench barriers between the public and policy formers to which all were ostensibly dedicated to overcome.

This thesis considers production in a two period general equilibrium model with incomplete markets. Long and short run production sets are considered. Long run production sets imply that, capital, raised by each firm through issuing stocks, is endogenized. We show that for any feasible combination of capital, equilibrium always exists. A main property of the model considered is that the efficient boundary of the production set available to each firm is not independent of its financial activities. This links the real with the financial sector of the economy. Equilibrium properties beyond existence of equilibrium include the separation of the activities of the agents, the efficient organization of production, and the determinateness of real equilibria.

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both policymakers and market participants. This is of particular concern in developing countries where, in the absence of full risk sharing mechanisms, the economic and social costs of swings in the business cycle are very high. Previous analyses of developing country stylised facts have tended to feature only small samples, for example the seminal paper by Agénor et al. (2000) considers just twelve middle-income economies. Consequently, the results are subjective and dependent on the chosen countries. Motivated by the importance of these business cycle statistics and the lack of consistency amongst existing research, this thesis makes an important contribution to the literature by extending and generalising the developing country stylised facts; examining both classical and growth cycles for a sample of thirty-two developing countries. One significant finding that emerges is the persistence of output fluctuations in developing countries and the strong positive relationship between the magnitude of this persistence and the level of economic development. The observation of procyclical real wages and significant price persistence indicates the suitability of a New Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices, to explore this relationship; thus, the vertical production chain model of Huang and Liu (2001) was implemented. This model lends itself to such an analysis, as by altering the number of production stages (N) it is possible to represent economies at different levels of development. There was found to be a strong significant positive relationship between the magnitude of output persistence generated by the model and economic development. However, a very significant finding of this analysis is that the model overestimates output persistence in high inflation countries and underestimates output persistence in low inflation countries. This has important implications not only for this model, but also for any economist attempting to construct a business cycle model capable of replicating the observed patterns of output persistence.

This thesis comprises four essays on inequality of opportunity in health and human development. Chapter 2 proposes an empirical implementation of the concept of inequality of opportunity in health and applies it to data from the UK National Child Development Study. Drawing on the distinction between circumstance and effort variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, circumstances are proxied by parental socio-economic status and childhood health; effort is proxied by health-related lifestyles and educational attainment. Stochastic dominance tests are used to detect inequality of opportunity in the conditional distributions of self-assessed health in adulthood. Alternative measures of inequality of opportunity are proposed. Parametric models are estimated to quantify the triangular relationship between circumstances, effort and health. The results indicate considerable and persistent inequality of opportunity in health. Circumstances affect health in adulthood both directly and through effort factors such as educational attainment, suggesting complementary educational policies may be important for reducing health inequalities. Chapter 3 specifies a behavioural model of inequality of opportunity in health that integrates John Roemer’s framework of inequality of opportunity with the Grossman model of health capital and demand for health. The model generates a recursive system of equations for health and lifestyles, which is jointly estimated by full information maximum likelihood with freely correlated error terms. The analysis innovates by accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, thereby addressing the partial-circumstance problem, and by extending the analysis to health outcomes other than self-assessed health, namely long standing illness, disability and mental health. Chapter 4 explores the existence of long-term health returns to different qualities of education, and examines the role of quality of schooling as a source of inequality of opportunity in health. It provides corroborative evidence of a statistically significant and economically sizable association between quality of education and a number of health and health-related outcomes that remains valid beyond the effects of measured ability, social development and academic qualifications. The results also establish quality of schooling as a leading source of inequality of opportunity in health. Chapter 5 exploits a natural experiment provided by the fact that cohort-members attended different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales that commenced in the 1960’s. This experiment is used to explore the impact of educational attainment and of school quality on health and health-related behaviour later in life. A combination of matching methods, parametric regressions, and instrumental variable approaches are used to deal with selection effects and to evaluate differences in adult health outcomes and health-related behaviour for cohort members exposed to the old (selective) and to the new (comprehensive) educational systems.

A countercyclical fiscal policy combined with sustainable fiscal finances is considered to be one of the most important objectives in modern economic policy. However, procyclical fiscal policy is widely observed in practice, especially in emerging market countries. The main purposes of this thesis are to examine the determinants of fiscal procyclicality and sustainability with special reference to the role of fiscal rules, and to assess the impact of both fiscal procyclicality and sustainability on economic growth. This thesis deals with several new issues on fiscal procyclicality and sustainability which have been ignored in the existing literature. We explore the role of the time coverage of fiscal rules in determining fiscal procyclicality and assess the effect of fiscal procyclicality on economic growth across spending categories and country groups. We also attempt to answer the determinants of fiscal sustainability and the effect of fiscal sustainability on economic growth for the first time. Our empirical analyses yield a number of novel and interesting findings. First, we find that government consumption and investment appear to be procyclical while current transfers appear to be countercyclical in a large number of OECD countries. Second, we find that most OECD countries seem to maintain sustainable fiscal finances and several factors such as the growth rate, the level of development, and aging populations could play a role in determining fiscal sustainability. Third, we find that procyclical current expenditure, especially government consumption and current transfers, could have a negative effect on economic growth, and this negative effect is prominent in emerging market countries. We also find that fiscal sustainability does not seem to play any role in economic growth in tranquil times. Finally, we find that the introduction of fiscal rules not only help achieve both countercyclical and sustainable fiscal policy, but also boost economic growth indirectly by stimulating countercyclical fiscal policy. Multi-year fiscal rules contribute more toward mitigating the level of fiscal procyclicality than annual fiscal rules, and fiscal rules with enforceability, such as the Stability and Growth Pact rules, appear to help maintain sustainable fiscal finances.

This thesis critically evaluates the measurement of outcomes in economic evaluations of drug misuse interventions. Three different aspects of measuring outcomes are examined: one focusing on non-monetary outcomes at the individual patient level; one focusing on monetary outcomes within studies using individual patient level data; and one focusing on long-term outcomes, both monetary and non-monetary. The many limitations of measuring these outcomes in existing economic evaluations of drug misuse interventions are exposed and the problems with conducting such studies are identified. The importance of this thesis is thus in providing an overview and methodological critique of the extant economic evaluations of drug misuse interventions. In addition a decision analytic model for a drug testing in schools programme is developed to illustrate how the limitations highlighted in the methodological critique might be addressed by future research. The findings of the thesis reveal the problems with using EQ-5D as a generic outcome measure for economic evaluations of drug misuse interventions, as is recommended by NICE in the UK. The nature of drug misuse problems requires that a wide range of different measures, including drug misuse specific measures, must be taken into account when evaluating drug misuse interventions. Similarly, the limitations with existing studies that attempt to estimate the monetary outcome of drug misuse interventions are exposed, as many studies fail to take into account all of the costs that will determine the monetary impact of an intervention for society. The thesis stresses the complexity of drug misuse and the need to measure the long-term outcomes of interventions, which may be best achieved by developing drug misuse modelling studies. However, these models are then revealed to be themselves limited, in part due to the lack of real-world data available to set their parameters.

The rise in unemployment suffered by many advanced economies since 2007, particularly in Europe, has revived long standing debates about what policies are better equipped to fight unemployment. In one side of the debate, we find those who believe that structural reforms, particularly in the labour market, are the only way to achieve long lasting reductions of unemployment. In the other side of the controversy, we find those who argue that macroeconomic stimuli ought to be used to tackle unemployment. European policy makers have predominantly favoured the first view and accordingly they have agreed upon the “Europe 2020 agenda” (European Commission, 2010a) and most recently the “Fiscal Compact” (European Commission, 2012). The theoretical underpinning of these policies is the NAIRU model proposed by Layard and Nickell (1986). According to this approach the NAIRU is exclusively determined by structural features of the labour and goods market, which cannot be modified by demand policies. Further, the NAIRU is also thought to acts as an anchor for economic activity. Consequently, the only policy that can achieve long lasting reductions of unemployment is one that tackles the features of the labour and goods market that determine the NAIRU. This characterization of the NAIRU is far from uncontroversial, and many economists argue that there are long run links between aggregate demand and unemployment, which can channel the effects of demand policies onto the NAIRU. A well-known example is the hysteresis hypothesis proposed by Blanchard and Summers (1986), although Sawyer (1982), Rowthorn (1995,1999) and Hein (2006) also propose other channels. Furthermore, some of these authors also question the anchor properties of the NAIRU. Thus far, empirical research has not been able to settle this controversy. The aim of this thesis is to provide a new empirical assessment of the determinants of the NAIRU and its anchor properties. For that purpose, we analyse data from eight EU economies, namely the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Finland. The data cover the period from 1980 to 2007. We employ time series techniques, more specifically the Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive (CVAR) approach. This is applied to a theoretical model that encompasses the conflicting views of the NAIRU that we aim to assess. The key novelty of our research is the use of this encompassing model. This is the first time that such an approach has been employed in the literature. The second novelty of our work is that our sample extends the analysis to the 2000s, a period which has rarely been studied before. The findings presented in this thesis are in contrast to the dominant NAIRU view proposed by Layard and Nickell. First, we find that in all the countries in our sample, the NAIRU is determined by at least one of the following variables: Productivity, long term unemployment, capital stock or long term real interest rates. Second, we find that in all the countries in our sample, the NAIRU is either a weak anchor for economic activity or has no anchor properties at all.