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Presents the perspective of the Independent Group on British Aid (IGBA) 1997 White Paper on International Development. Measures for which the IGBA has been campaigning since the publication of "Real Aid: A Strategy for Britain," in 1982; Significance of the White Paper; Advice from the group regarding the White Paper on International Development.

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During the past decade, much attention has been paid to the migration-development nexus, both in academia and in the global development community. This has created what we argue in this paper can be characterized as an 'international buzz' around the issue. In this paper, we explore how two donor countries, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have approached the nexus in their policies and practices in recent years. We examine in what ways it has been feasible to work with migration-development links, taking into account various interests and the national political climates regarding development aid and immigration policies. Important themes of the nexus, which are discussed in detail going through the policies, are remittances, engagement with migrant associations, and temporary migration schemes and programmes addressing the so-called 'brain drain' problem. We argue that the two countries represent two different trends among donors: the one does not directly link migration management with migration and development policies, as these are conceived within the national donor agencies; while the other appears to be more focused on providing better migration management through development cooperation. In the conclusion, we argue that the consensus-orientated simplicity of the buzz surrounding migration and development can be said to have had a somewhat restricting effect on the policies, in the sense that it seems to have discouraged conflicting parts of the migration-development nexus from being taken up in the national contexts. Based on our analysis of the two countries' policies, we discuss possible implications for the future, reflecting on the tendency of buzzwords to dip in and out of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the degree to which recent trends in UK policy-making amount to a paradigm shift towards the prescriptions of ecological modernization (EM) theory. First, in keeping with EM's ‘win–win’ philosophy, recent political speeches and policy documents on the environment have expressed the idea that there is no conflict between environmental protection and economic growth. Second, policies have attempted to encourage the invention and diffusion of clean technologies. Third, policy-makers have explored innovative market-based policy approaches to tackle environmental problems. These three trends suggest UK policy-makers' predilection towards EM as a policy strategy. However, there has arguably been less success in terms of a fourth key characteristic of ‘ecologically modernized’ states, that of environmental policy integration. The paper concludes that New Labour's failure at ‘greening government’, combined with its economistic and technocratic policy focus, places the UK at the weak end of Christoff's (1996) weak–strong continuum of ecological modernization. As such, environmental imperatives continue to remain ideologically and politically peripheral to conventional economic goals. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long relative decline of Great Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate its causes. Recent contributions have stressed the deleterious effects of inappropriate and inconsistent government policies, in particular the deadweight of an inefficient public sector, and the contempt for industrial production on the part of a Treasury-dominated civil service elite obsessed with macroeconomic issues. They have also cited the anti-modernization ethos of the post-1945 political consensus. In a longer term perspective great stress has also been laid on the socio-cultural environment antipathetic to the industrial spirit, which, supposedly, had animated the business and investing classes in the pre-1850 phases of industrialization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of the new institutional approach as an explanation of Great Britain's relative economic decline in the twentieth century. The discussion will focus on economists B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick thesis as a reference point for assessing alternative formulations of institutional rigidities.

In this article we explore the implications of Brexit for the UK and the EU's development policies and strategic directions, focusing on the former. While it is likely that the operational process of disentangling the UK from the various development institutions of the EU will be relatively straightforward, the choices that lie ahead about whether and how to cooperate thereafter are more complex. Aid and development policy touches on a wide range of interests-security, trade, climate change, migration, gender rights, and so on. We argue that Brexit will accelerate existing trends within UK development policy, notably towards the growing priority of private sector-led economic growth strategies and blended finance tools. There are strong signals that UK aid will be cut, as successive secretaries of state appear unable to persuade a substantial section of the public and media that UK aid and development policy serves UK interests in a variety of ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines a transition from active intervention to a more passive response by the British Government in its grain market of the seventeenth century. It is often easier to assess the reasons for government action than for government inaction, since action is frequently accompanied by justifications whilst inaction is cloaked in documentary silence. Much has always had to be inferred, but some inferences are perhaps more soundly based than others. It is wrong to think that the Privy Council was losing faith in intervention before the end of the sixteenth century; the early 1630s saw the most intensive (and last) attempt to intervene comprehensively. Nor, possibly, can one argue that the subsequent disappearance of the old-style dearth program can be explained in terms of the disappearance of the Privy Council. An opportunity for the latter to intervene was presented in 1637/8, before its abolition, and small executive councils never totally disappeared. There is not very convincing evidence for the view that changes in London's needs and role influenced directly the timing of the policy changes.