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This paper criticizes the supply-side economic policy promoted by the UK government under Prime Minister Liz Truss. According to the conventional interpretation, the stagnation and productivity crisis in the UK economy is due to the excessive tax burden on large corporations and the tax burden on the richest 1%. If these tax liabilities were reduced, it would increase the profitability of investment, demand and the rate of growth. This would translate into better incomes and higher levels of employment. This story is based on the Laffer curve and associated with the "trickle down" hypothesis, falsified by empirical evidence. Tax reductions for the richest people worsen the distribution of income, and do not raise income or employment. The cause and effect is from profits to investment and growth; not from spending to profits and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product-Service Systems (PSSs) constitute a family of service-based business models designed to satisfy our societal needs in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner. To date however PSS application has remained niche due to a variety of critical barriers. This paper explores how ‘demand pull’ national government policies could support PSS activity by addressing these barriers and cultivating market demand. Lessons are drawn from a case study of how regulatory , economic incentive , informative and procurement policies have supported Energy Service Company (ESCo) activity in the UK; a sub-set of the PSS family focused on energy service provision. Subsequently five policy recommendations are presented to support PSS activity: (1) balancing economic incentives and regulatory disincentives; (2) promoting indirect policy support; (3) redesigning existing market structures; (4) promoting locally-led PSS activity; and (5) creating stable policy frameworks. The paper warns however that national government policy cannot easily address all PSS barriers, such as customer preferences, international developments, technological progress and inherent business model weaknesses, pointing to the need for other complementary solutions. Furthermore, other governance actors beside national government could also implement PSS supporting policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a nationally representative household survey on the tendency to regret purchases across 20 product groups. The survey reveals that the vast majority of adults in Great Britain (82%) have regretted a purchase in the past. Post-purchase regret is shown to be particularly prevalent for clothing & footwear and takeaway food. The tendency to regret purchases appears to reduce with age and to be more common amongst white collar rather than blue collar workers. Combining survey results with average price estimates gives an estimated, aggregate, annual expenditure on regretted purchases of £5–25bn, equivalent to 2–10% of annual consumer spending on goods in Great Britain. These findings are interesting because they suggest that there is a degree of self-assessed over-consumption that, if reduced, could help to reduce pressures on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal partnerships are the primary mechanism to support local and regional integrated coastal management (ICM) in the United Kingdom. This paper identifies four evolutionary stages of coastal partnership development, in which partnerships pass through stages of foundation, challenge, reflection and renewal. Through examining these stages, it was apparent that the manner in which coastal partnerships in the UK support ICM has evolved from a plan-led approach to a service-based approach since the early 1990s. In the service-based approach, partnerships support ICM through an ongoing programme of facilitated stakeholder engagement, capacity building and information exchange, rather than through the development and implementation of an outcome-based management plan. This has been prompted by a number of interconnected factors, including funding scarcity, a historic lack of national-level support and ambiguous evidence of success. Following a discussion of the benefits and burdens of the service-based approach, the paper concludes that whilst the service-based ICM support model offers many advantages and opportunities, the wider coastal governance framework in the UK may still present considerable challenges to its future success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity demand forecasts are needed for decisions regarding generation dispatch for lead times as short as just a few minutes. Imbalance between generation and demand causes deviation of the system frequency from its target, which in Great Britain is 50 Hz. This, in turn, causes a change in demand, due largely to motor loads. For Great Britain, the change is estimated to be 2.5% of demand per 1 Hz of frequency deviation from its target. This can be used to calculate the demand that would have occurred if frequency had been at 50 Hz. Modeling and forecasting the resulting frequency-corrected demand provides a better basis for dispatching generation. This paper evaluates methods for forecasting frequency-corrected demand up to 10 min ahead. We introduce an exponential smoothing model that, like the system operator's proposed Kalman filter approach, jointly models frequency and demand. We also evaluate a set of univariate methods applied directly to the series of frequency-corrected demand. These methods have not previously been considered for lead times less than 10 min. In our empirical analysis, the best results were produced by a seasonal exponential smoothing method applied directly to the series of frequency-corrected demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a school of thought that future demand for meat and other farm animal products is unsustainable for several reasons, including greenhouse gas emissions, especially from ruminants; standards of farm animal health and welfare, especially when farm animals are kept intensively; efficiency of conversion by livestock of solar energy into (human) food, particularly by pigs and poultry; water availability and usage for all types of agricultural production, including livestock; and human health and consumption of meat, eggs and milk. Demand for meat is forecast to rise as a result of global population growth and increasing affluence. These issues buttress an impending perfect storm of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy, which is likely to coincide with global population reaching about 9 billion people in 2030 (pace Beddington). This paper examines global demand for animal products, the narrative of 'sustainable intensification' and the implications of each for the future of farm animal welfare. In the UK, we suggest that, though non-ruminant farming may become unsustainable, ruminant agriculture will continue to prosper because cows, sheep and goats utilize grass and other herbage that cannot be consumed directly by humans, especially on land that is unsuitable for other purposes. However, the demand for meat and other livestock-based food is often for pork, eggs and chicken from grain-fed pigs and poultry. The consequences of such a perfect storm are beginning to be incorporated in long-term business planning by retailers and others. Nevertheless, marketing sustainable animal produce will require considerable innovation and flair in public and private policies if marketing messages are to be optimized and consumer behaviour modified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the mid-eighteenth century, most people lived in near-complete darkness except in the presence of sunlight and moonlight. Since then, the provision of artificial light has been revolutionised by a series of innovations in appliances, fuels, infrastructures and institutions that have enabled the growing demands of economic development for artificial light to be met at dramatically lower costs: by the year 2000, while United Kingdom GDP per capita was 15 times its 1800 value, lighting services cost less than one three thousandth of their 1800 value, per capita use was 6,500 times greater and total lighting consumption was 25,000 times higher than in 1800. The economic history of light shows how focussing on developments in energy service provision rather than simply on energy use and prices can reveal the 'true' declines in costs, enhanced levels of consumption and welfare gains that have been achieved. While emphasising the value of past experience, the paper also warns against the dangers of over-reliance on past trends for the long-run forecasting of energy consumption given the potential for the introduction of new Technologies and fuels, and for rebound and saturation effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]