Previous Events

An intense debate is raging in Western Europe. Growth is slowing, employment is falling, the number of people living off the state is increasing, and welfare services are deteriorating. Why? Who is responsible? What should be done?
The problems have been obvious for a long time and new ones are now being added: an ageing population, ever-more-expensive services, international competition, an international labour market and a heterogeneous society.
Some reforms are taking place. Taxes are being lowered, public commitments limited, private initiatives admitted, and deregulation measures introduced. But the reforms in Western Europe are far too modest, and the politicians in charge are keeping quiet about the aims – in fact, they often argue the opposite. This is dangerous because citizens are being kept in the dark about the purpose of the changes.

"What is driving healthcare demand? What to do with an ageing society? How can we ensure a "fair" distribution of dwindling health budgets? How do we administer shortages?" These issues erroneously dominate the current debate and present healthcare as a "cost" to society and a problem for decision-makers. Rather than focussing on budget cuts or rationing, a report presented at this event demonstrated why the cost control paradigm is a fallacy and revealed why healthcare has the potential of becoming the largest service industry in our societies.

The Stockholm Network and Policy Exchange held a briefing with the Croatian Minister of Justice, Vesna Škare Ožbolt to discuss important current European political issues. Talks between Croatia and the EU over accession only began recently after a long and laborious investigation determined that Croatia is cooperating fully with the International Criminal Tribunal in chasing down suspected war criminals. However, a key former Croatian general remains at large. Equally, corruption remains a huge problem in Croatia, and judicial reform remains a key area if Croatia is ultimately to accede to the EU.

Growing competition from the Asian giants is making Western economies ever more reliant on the development of knowledge-based products and services. Yet ideas are unique among resources because they are potentially limitless, but possess no monetary value until realised and utilised. Should, therefore, ideas be treated as public goods because of their ephemeral nature? Or does the very difficulty of transforming an idea into reality merit some reward? Are consumers best served by allowing all to profit from the reproduction of another's original work? Or can the fruits of an idea reach their largest potential market if their reproduction is restricted?

The Bush administration promised to introduce the “ownership society”. A centrepiece of this policy is individual empowerment for retirement by means of personal accounts for every citizen. This would bring both responsibility for savings, greater wealth and reduction of government debt.

Rendering Social Security to its beneficiaries will also contain the ultimate choice: those who prefer greater risk and returns in the form of investment on capital markets are free to opt out; whereas risk-averse citizens may choose to remain in the current system, albeit with lower benefits.

But with expanding federal expenditure, some fear that retirement reform may stall.

Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Darfur: all these agonies of the post-Cold War landscape are examples of places where the United Nations failed to act as it should. Few people doubt that the UN's ability to guarantee international security stands in urgent need of reform, but there is no real prospect of agreement on how to do it. In the absence of a credible international system for security, do individual countries have the right to take international law into their own hands? Is it better if a democracy, which is at least subject to some form of accountability, does it than if a dictatorship does? Does the existence of a broad coalition make action outside the UN more acceptable? Or are these just steps towards the old doctrine of 'might is right'?

The book investigates the roots of anti-Western stereotypes and the demonizing fantasies about the Western world that fuel so much hatred in the hearts of its enemies. According to the authors, the idea of the West is a dangerous mirage of our own time, just as the mirage of the East was in the Western colonial mind, described by Edward Said in the much acclaimed book ‘Orientalism’. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of reasons, the authors argue, but this doesn’t make it an exclusively Islamic matter. Rather, the bogeyman of the West who stalks the thinking of Al Qaeda and radical Islam is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century.

Launched by Terry o’Dwyer at the House of Lords, the Antidote-PACT (Partnership Against Counterfeit Trade) initiative is an experimental programme designed to bridge the gap between thinking and acting on the problem of medical counterfeiting.

The author has been at the forefront of research into health inequalities for the past 20 years, investigating explanations for the striking inverse social gradient in morbidity and mortality. By drawing on his own research and the research of others, Marmot tries to illustrate that the social gradient in health is related to the nature of the society in which we live and work. How much control and opportunity an individual has for full social engagement in society are crucial for health. These are related to early child development, material well being, the nature of work and communities and the circumstances in which older people live. Marmot argues that being at the bottom of the social pile is bad for health, but so is not being at the top.

What are the causes behind the sclerosis in the Belgian labour market? Are the workings of the labour market in Belgium so dysfunctional that we have passed the point of no return? It is clear that labour market reform is essential if the Belgian economy is to thrive – but what policies should be adopted? Should Belgians take an Anglo-Saxon approach to labour market regulation – or should it follow the example of its continental neighbours?