Publications
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Real Interest and the Return to Normalcy
25th July 2007
What drives markets in the end are fundamentals, and few variables are as important as the real interest rate—the return, after inflation, on relatively risk-less assets. It determines one part of the return on savings, and it feeds through into the relative price of debt versus equity. For the first half of this decade—after the crash of 2000—real rates have been close to zero (and even at times below zero). As a result there has been a boom in consumer spending, a dash-for-...
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A Browner shade of green: energy and environment after Blair
9th July 2007
The handover from Blair to Brown has been a long drawn-out process, and now it has finally happened and a new Cabinet and ministers have been appointed, the policy questions return. How green is Brown? How will the recent White Papers on energy planning, and the draft Climate Change Bill be taken forward? Will short-termism - and the next election strategy - take precedence over the longer-term challenges of climate change and investment in power stations and networks? What does the change in...
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The Structure and Operation of Government and the Challenges of Climate Change
20th June 2007
Memorandum of evidence submitted to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry.
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Reforming Airport Regulation
11th June 2007
The current debate about the future of airport regulation in the UK has arisen for a variety of reasons, which have together built up a substantive case for reform. In addition to the customer and airline complaints on the quality of service, the takeover of BAA has changed the context of the periodic review, revealing new information, and raising substantial issues of ring-fencing and the protections in place in the event of failure by the new owners. The context is further altered by the...
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Labourquotes third Energy White Paper
25th May 2007
The latest UK energy white paper – Meeting the Energy Challenge – will probably be remembered as a modest further step in the attempt to construct an energy framework which marries up the liberalised market and competition regime inherited from the 1990s, with a set of public aims and targets which the market would not on its own deliver.
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European energy policy: meeting security of supply and climate change challenges. EIB paper, Vol.12
1st May 2007
European Investment Bank Papers, Volume 12, 2007
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Helm, D. R. (ed) (2007), quoteThe New Energy Paradigmquote, Oxford, Oxford University Press
23rd April 2007
This volume, edited by Dieter Helm, brings together leading international experts to consider the various aspects of the new paradigm of energy policy.
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Climate change: sustainable growth, markets and institutions
1st April 2007
Paper for the UN Human Development Report 2007
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BBC Paper on Future of the Licence Fee and its Regulation
29th January 2007
The 2006/07 renewal of the Charter and the settlement of the licence fee have not resulted in a consensus as to the future of the BBC.
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Europe’s energy crunch
26th January 2007
The energy sector has a habit of creating surprises. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when oil prices touched $10 a barrel, and there was excess capacity in most European countries, nobody worried much about security of supply, and bothered even less about climate change. All that changed at the end of 1999: oil prices started their continuous upwards growth, to peak at around $70 a barrel before falling back, power cuts periodically reappeared, and a number of European countries had very close...