Chuka Umunna vows to get firms to put more ethnic minorities on boards September 30, 2014 Labour’s shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna yesterday promised to hold UK businesses to account over the number of senior black and ethnic minority staff they employ, most notably at board level. Pledging to introduce a Davies-style commission and report into why people from ethnic minorities make up just one in 15 senior management positions, Umunna [...]
No change in the gender split and none of the most populous six countries gets a vice presidency: Who’s who in Juncker’s commission September 11, 2014 Back in 2012, the European Commission decided it would tackle gender inequality and "break the glass ceiling that continues to bar female talent from top positions in Europe’s biggest companies." The target it set was 40 per cent, despite the fact that at the time the gender split was 19-9 in its own executive – [...]
Forget Piketty: How Sweden combined wealth and equality through capitalism August 27, 2014 SWEDEN continues to be one of the countries others look to for an answer to this fundamental question of our times: how can a country successfully combine increasing prosperity with a relatively egalitarian distribution? The French economist Thomas Piketty provided part of an answer in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he [...]
Warsi warns Conservatives won’t win election outright without attracting ethnic minority votes August 10, 2014 Baroness Warsi, the Conservative minister who resigned this week over the government’s position on Gaza, has warned the Conservative party that it will fail to win an outright majority at next year’s general election if it doesn’t do more to attract voters from ethnic minorities. Speaking in interviews with the Independent on Sunday and The [...]
Nick Clegg: We’ll force big business to publish gender pay gap data July 17, 2014 A Liberal Democrat manifesto pledge to force big companies to publish the average pay of their male and female employees has been dismissed as “crude” by the Institute of Directors (IoD). The policy, launched today by leader Nick Clegg and employment minister Jo Swinson, would mean businesses that employed more than 250 people must publish [...]
The Bank of England’s latest hire literally wrote the paper on the trade-off between growth and equality May 15, 2014 The arrival of US economist Kristin Forbes at the Bank of England is a huge win for the institution. With it, it's picked up one of the hottest properties in academia, with a near unrivalled knowledge of financial contagion and capital flows. She'll be the Monetary Policy Committee's first female member in five years when [...]
How executive pay regulations can increase inequality – not reduce it May 7, 2014 IN JUST two months, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has taken the world by storm. In it, he argues that substantial increases in inequality can only be reversed through government intervention. Piketty’s own suggestion is a 2 per cent annual wealth tax, and income tax rates of up to 80 per cent. In [...]
Why making it easier to volunteer would narrow Britain’s gender pay gap May 1, 2014 WILL the Conservatives’ flagship initiative, the Big Society, again occupy a prominent position in the upcoming elections? In deciding, the Tories might like to consult the surprising results of our recent research on volunteer work. We asked the following question: when you work for free to help others in society, does it also increase your [...]
The boardroom debate needs to move beyond gender April 10, 2014 WEAK and ineffectual boards are a risk to the health of their companies and to the whole UK economy. As the Flowers chairmanship of Co-op Bank showed, a board that does not contain the right mix of skills and experience will not be able to prevent mistakes from happening. We need financial and technical experts [...]
Inequality myth-busting: Why the UK doesn’t have to answer to Sweden March 18, 2014 CONCERN about inequalities of income and wealth is now a fashionable topic, and featured strongly in the gathering of the world’s top brass at Davos earlier this year. Much of the popular coverage of the subject gives the impression that not only is inequality at record highs, but that it is confined to the wicked [...]