Good Local Economics
It’s truly amazing the amount of quality material and insights from many sources which I come across daily, local to international. The upside is that these pertinent titbits are deserving of distribution into the right hands, with the assumption that they represent ‘best thinking’ on a particular issue or topic. The downside is that I know that this is wishful thinking, as I do not see that we yet have a way to assure for this practice, working with colleagues who are on the same page. Can we tackle this one?
A special double edition of Local Economy on welfare reform and labour market activation is scheduled for publication in early August. As editor of Local Economy, I’m compelled to use every opportunity to plug the journal as hard as I can, but I’m plugging especially hard in this instance because I think it’s important to try to re-set the terms of the somewhat uninspiring debate that is currently accompanying welfare reform in this country. I hope that, in part, this can be done by comparing the UK’s welfare arrangements and reform trajectory with those in other countries, and indeed, the edition offers something of a smorgasbord of alternative versions of social protection and labour market interventions. About half of the 250 pages or so in this edition accommodate papers from the UK, but we also have articles about the USA, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Japan, and China.
