Economics and Society - Research

Many people living in rural areas face hardship but the UK’s welfare system is poorly adapted to meet their needs, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and cutbacks exacerbating pressures. This book combines person-based and place-based approaches to tackling rural poverty.

A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book questions ‘project speed’: where time to think, deliberate and plan has been squeezed. The authors demonstrate the many benefits of slow planning for the key participants, multiple interests and planning system overall.

Drawing on the perspectives of women and children displaced from Ukraine, as well as local authority policy makers and service providers, this book provides a unique view of the direct and indirect consequences of war in Europe and identifies the best responses to these ‘wicked issues’.

Combining robust evidence with real-life stories, this book reveals the shocking impact of austerity policies on life expectancy and offers an optimistic vision of what can be done to restore life expectancy and reduce health inequality.

Positioning social policy within political economy and social contract debates, Wistow draws on empirical evidence to show how the social contract produces longstanding inequitable consequences in relation to health, place and social mobility in England.

This book explores tax and social policy and how they interact with each other. It covers key interactions, debates and challenges of tax and social policy and examines how analyses might be combined and policy options developed for effective delivery in both areas.

Carrie Manning’s illuminating book examines how policies to limit taxation at state and local levels in the US have direct and lasting consequences for equity, accountability, and ultimately for democracy.

Capitalism only celebrates success, and it can be difficult to know what to do when it is confronted with failure. This book explores what happens when people go broke, and what the experience of bankruptcy and insolvency is like up close.

Academics from a range of disciplines and from a number of European and Latin American countries come together to question what it means to have a ‘sustainable society’ and to ask what role alternative social and solidarity economies can play.

This book offers a theory of trafficking and modern slavery with implications for policy. Going beyond polarised debates on the sex trade, this book shows the importance of coercion and the societal complexities that perpetuate modern slavery.

Agri-food systems in the Global North are experiencing a wave of technological innovation in food production and ways of eating. This book is the first to analyse technological and socio-economic change in leading food sectors and it concludes that despite innovation, the food industry is adapting too slowly to the challenges of climate change.

Written by two distinguished housing economists, this ambitious book tackles one of the most important socio-economic issues facing households today. Drawing from theoretical and empirical frameworks, the authors challenge conventional wisdoms in housing economics and policy and offer innovative recommendations to improve housing affordability.