Business and Economics

By Professor Christopher H. Bovis, Professor of International and European Business Law, University of Hull Inevitably, the question of UK membership of the European Union will be centred on two issues: The need for reform of EU institutions and the way the EU is governed The ability of the UK to influence EU decisions Reform is badly needed The European Union is malfunctioning. It has lost the zest of the “common market”,becoming instead a self-fulfilling prophesy of political union with disproportionally...

Satire by Jack Peat  Tech-giant Apple has announced it is to build a tax-free haven off the coast of America out of bags of its excess cash. The company has been confronted with a surplus cash headache of late and now finds itself in the compromising position of making more money than it can spend. But CEO and ‘money making monster’ Tim Cook has devised a devilish plan to create a new tax-free haven built from bags of cash that...

A new study has uncovered key trends on how patient we are as a nation, finding the internet may have had a role to play in our slipping tolerance levels. The survey of 2,000 people found a third of Brits now describe themselves as someone who has no patience generally and one in two Brits have become more impatient in the last five years. Those we love most are the more trying, the results showed, with respondents most likely to...

Written by Sharmin Cheema On the 28th of December 2014, air traffic control lost contact with AirAsia Flight QZ8501 an hour after the plane departed Indonesia for Singapore, after the plane “climbed at abnormal speed” in bad weather before stalling and crashing into the Karimata Strait, off the west coast of Borneo. All of a sudden AirAsia’s CEO, Tony Fernandes, found himself in a limelight so glaring post-MH370 and MH17 with a couple of nationals in the UK including The Guardian, the BBC, the Independent, and the Telegraph quick...

By Andrea Osborne, from cushion the impact If your desk needs a fast and furious makeover her are six successful tips to help you clean up your act. EMAIL SURGERY – Did you know we only use 20% of our emails correctly? Using emails inefficiently can drain our productivity. So organise them, create different folders for emails to keep all relevant messages together. This will enable you to find what you need a lot more quickly. Use filters so that...

2:30pm today (Friday 23rd) is the busiest time of year for job-hunters, research suggests.   Restless workers will be polishing their CVs later today after the third Friday in January was found to be the peak period for workers to complete job applications, search for new posts and tweak resumes.   The combination of post-Christmas debt, January blues and New Year resolutions combine today to create a ‘perfect storm’ of conditions where half of Brits in full time employment will scramble...

By Steve Taggart David Cameron tops poll, but almost two thirds believe British politicians don’t know enough about technology  Twitter fan David Cameron is the UK’s most tech-savvy politician with Nigel Farage polling in a distant fifth place, according to new research released today by Crucial.com. However, the insights also show that almost two thirds (64%) of people do not believe that Britain’s top politicians boast sufficient knowledge of technology to help boost the economy. Last year, Boris Johnson vowed...

By Brett Scott  Money pervades our everyday economic interactions. But, despite its importance, it is also pervasively misunderstood. Here are three common monetary myths – frequently perpetuated by economists – that need challenging. Myth 1: Money emerges from barter Economists often tell a tale about how old communities first used barter to exchange goods and services. Bartering throws up tricky situations. Take as an example a farmer trying to exchange a cow for bread from a baker, a clumsy and...

By Darragh Roche The term 'job creator' has crept into the political lexicon on both sides of the Atlantic. It sounds harmless, but don't be fooled - it is the quiet vanguard of a political and economic nightmare. Calling Ayn Rand a novelist is generous, calling her a philosopher borders on the ludicrous. But her corpus of regressive ideas has ignited the hard right in the United States. The coming Republican presidential primaries will give deficit hawks and would-be economic...