Innovation

This presentation was given at a workshop hosted by the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (ITPS) on the 21 May 2012 in Seville.

Multinational firms outsourcing or offshoring their operations to developing countries is a problem as old as globalisation. This column looks at the effect on high-skilled labour in the home country. It presents evidence that, on average, when firms start employing high-skilled workers offshore, they also increase the number of this type of worker employed at home.

This presentation was given in January 2012 at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC.

China has experienced unprecedented investment in skills and science, which has resulted in rapid growth in innovative outputs. New evidence suggests that Chinese inventors have the capacity to engage in research at the technology frontier. Such trends have fuelled widespread concerns over Western economies' ability to maintain their dominance in knowledge creation and high skill employment. However, innovation is not a zero-sum game; the success of China need not be at the expense of the West.

This article was published in Vox on 30th June 2011

This presentation was delivered at the IFS workshop 'The taxation of intellectual property and patent boxes'.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, yesterday confirmed that a Patent Box will be introduced in the UK in 2013. This policy will reduce the rate of corporation tax on the income derived from patents to 10%. Our analysis suggests that the policy will lead to a large reduction in UK tax receipts from the income derived from patents, is poorly targeted at promoting research, will add complexity to the tax system, and it is far from clear that any additional research resulting from the policy will take place in the UK.

This presentation was given at the Oxbridge Public Economics Lectures in October 2010

Today's GDP figures show that the economy grew by 0.2% in the first quarter of 2010. In the election campaign much has been made of the impact of the timing of spending cuts and tax increases on the ability of the UK economy to sustain this recovery. This is an important issue, but much less attention has been given to the equally important question of how UK growth is likely to fare in the medium term which will be largely determined by efficiency with which we produce goods and services and the extent to which we develop new ideas.

This presentation was given at the launch of the 2010 Green Budget.