DO ‘LABOUR’ COUNCILS LOWER ECONOMIC FREEDOM?

Authors

Nicholas Apergis, University of Piraeus, GreeceFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Using a panel of the UK counties, spanning the period 2010-2016, this study exploreswhether having a Labour or Conservative council affects a county’s economic freedom.Due to data unavailability of any economic freedom index for the UK counties,the analysis employed direct measures in relevance to three sub-components ofeconomic freedom, i.e. size of government, sound money and the freedom to tradeinternationally. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find strong evidencethat the political ideology of a council affects all three sub-components of economicfreedom. An implication of this result is that councils appeal to specific groups ofvoters when making policy.

Recommended Citation

Apergis, Nicholas (2018) "DO ‘LABOUR’ COUNCILS LOWER ECONOMIC FREEDOM?," Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking: Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 5.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21098/bemp.v21i1.958
Available at: https://bulletin.bmeb-bi.org/bmeb/vol21/iss2/5

First Page

149

Last Page

160

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Country

Greece

Affiliation

University of Piraeus