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From September 2012 most home undergraduates at English universities are being charged fees of £9,000 per annum. These are funded by a government loan, which attracts interest from the moment they start their course; after three years their accumulated debt exceeds £30,000. They can also borrow to cover their living costs, on the same terms, so that those studying in London can graduate with a debt of more than £50,000-although those from low-income families can obtain grants and universities are encouraged to provide bursaries and other support to students from underrepresented groups. Graduates start repaying their debts once their annual income exceeds £21,000-at a rate of 9% of the difference between their income and that figure: until the debt is fully repaid it continues to attract interest, by as much as three percentage points above the current inflation rate. Using data from a calculator on a government website, this paper shows that the highest-paid graduates pay back less than those on middle incomes: the 'squeezed middle' pays back more not only than those on low incomes but also the better-paid and those whose incomes increase more rapidly. This has differential effects according to occupation-and sex; and middle-income groups also contribute more to the costs of widening participation programmes, which all universities charging more than £6,000 per annum are required to fund. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate appropriate methods of modelling the business cycle theory of trade union growth, and to develop and estimate a specification of the business cycle model. In so doing, the paper draws on the important pioneering work of Bain and Elsheikh (1976) for the United Kingdom. (The results of extension of the Bain and Elsheikh model to 1980 are shown in Appendix A.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the 'breadwinner-homemaker' household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner-homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources-especially for individualized expenditures-in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bibliography on the subject of the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland is presented, which includes the books "The English Country House: Explained," by T. Yorke, "The Plantation of Ulster," by J. Bardon, and "English Country House Eccentrics," by D. Evans.

The article reviews periodical literature on economic history that was published in 2011. Topics noted include the origins of medieval common rights systems, statistics from the record-keeping text "Little Domesday Book," and gender roles in medieval Europe. Also addressed are the history of British maritime trade, the payment of compensation to British slave owners following abolition, and the history of the Scottish banking system. In addition, the history of property rights, cultural aspects of feminism, and post-World War II British politics are discussed.

Background Disabled young people with complex needs face particular challenges when they reach adulthood and seek to move from school to employment or further education. There are potentially substantial personal and social costs arising from these challenges. Methods We sought evidence from recent UK research, policy and related literatures; undertook exploratory statistical analyses of birth cohort data; and analysed information provided by 30 disabled young people requiring high levels of practical and communication support. Results The personal, family and social costs that result from unsuccessful transition are substantial and wide-ranging. Health service and local authority expenditure are important elements, but do not allow young people to achieve the educational or employment goals to which they aspire, resulting in considerable costs for the state, whether through missing opportunities to contribute to the economy or through dependence on welfare benefits. Conclusions The considerable sums currently spent on disabled children and young people are clearly not enough, or not deployed appropriately, to enable those who reach adulthood to fulfil their ambitions, or to meet government policy intentions for young people to achieve economic well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the attempts of British central government to react to the perceived inadequacy of official economic statistics. A huge amount of work went into this project, the main aim of which was to speed up the production of statistics so that the economy could be analysed in more detail, and thus better managed. If this was to work, more data was required on the labour market, on productivity, on production, and on the interlinkages between those indicators. British official statistics clearly were more comprehensive and more detailed at the end of this period than they had been at the start. Even so, the effort was usually thought to have been a failure by the early 1970s. More detail took time to produce; it was difficult to recruit the necessary staff; successive administrative reorganizations also absorbed energies. The devolved informality of British government hampered the emergence of an overall picture. Businesses and trade unions resisted attempts to collect more data, especially when it showed them in an unflattering light. Above all, the elite, specialist, and technical nature of the reform process meant that very little political and popular pressure built up to force through further changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the importance of market to consumers in the late medieval economy in Great Britain. Apart from the volume of international trade, which was worth more than 250,000 pound per annum for the whole of the period 1275- 1500, England's internal trade may well have handled a quarter or more of gross national product, the estimated proportion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late thirteenth century all sections of society participated in a complex commercial network: the aristocracy drew most of their landed income in cash from rents and the sale of demesne produce; peasants needed to raise money both to pay rents and to buy goods and services; the urban population depended for their incomes on the profits of trade and crafts; at least 1 in 3 of those living in both town and country earned wages, often paid in cash. Geographers explain the marketing pattern in terms of a spatial distribution of towns, which differed in size and function. Above the local network of small towns, the higher order centers sold a variety of specialized goods and services over a wide area, so that a customer requiring an unusual or expensive article would go to a large and distant center.

This article discusses the use of the Decree Rolls of Chancery as a source for economic history in Great Britain. Any reasonable assessment of the progress of historical research takes care to emphasize that patches of light and patches of darkness owe their distribution not so much to insight and blindness among the craftsmen as to the presence or absence of documentary evidence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much litigation in the Courts of Exchequer and Chancery was touched off by matters that are central to the concern of economic history, although means of access to the information embodied in the legal records quite fail to match the importance of these evidences for historical inquiry. It has long been known, principally through E.M. Leonard's work at the beginning of this century, that the Court of Chancery had a special role in the history of the English enclosure movement through its willingness to accept and adjudicate actions relating to land title where enclosure and redistribution of holdings had taken place. In a period when the motives and methods of enclosure were still displaying considerable variety there are instances of Chancery actions in which the litigants were genuinely in combat.

The article measures the effect of public finance during the period 1793-1815 on the rate and direction of Great Britain's economic development. It explores the country's involvement in war during the period. One aspect of the war which has intermittently attracted economists" attention from the time of the "bullionist" controversy is the effect of the expedients that were adopted in the field of public finance. The article describes the sources of data which economic historian can use to be able to fairly measure the effect of the country's finance on the rate and direction of economic growth. An analysis on the economic indicators during the period is presented.

Comments on the article "The Myth of a British Industrial Revolution," by Michael Fores. Reason why there is no Industrial Revolution in the century 1750-1850; Conception of applied science as a misnomer since science is purely theoretical; Emphasis on the gradual evolutionary character of British industrialization.