Fredrik Segerfeldt argues that migration benefits not only migrants from developing countries but also the family and friends that they leave behind. The idea of 'brain drain,' that the outward flow of the best and brightest inhabitants of a developing country adversely affects that country's prospects, is not borne out in the empirical data, while remittances are shown to significantly ameliorate poverty. 

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• Social cohesion is the strength of interactions between members of society. These interactions are characterised by a number of norms that include trust, a sense of belonging, and a willingness to participate.
• Measures of social cohesion include generalised trust, interpersonal trust, civic participation and volunteering.
• Evidence from the US suggests a strong relationship between rising diversity and lower levels of generalised trust. There is much less evidence for a relationship between diversity and other measures of social cohesion in the US.
• There are some cultural reasons to suspect that American evidence might not fully apply to Europe and the UK.
• European evidence at a national level does not suggest a negative relationship between diversity and trust or other social cohesion indicators.
• Evidence from the UK is mixed. There is some evidence to suggest an association between higher diversity and lower generalised trust – yet there is also conflicting evidence which finds no such association.
• There is little evidence to suggest a negative relationship between diversity and other measures of social cohesion such as: civic participation, trust in authority, or voluntary work in the UK.

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Dr. Eamonn Butler's monograph for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Foundations of Free Society, has now been translated into Spanish, for the 548m speakers worldwide who count it as a first or second language. The book tells how free societies unleash talent and initiative to create prosperity and happiness.

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The UK wind debate assumes that wind farms operate at roughly their average output most of the time. According to Dr. Capell Aris’ new paper produced in concert with the Scientific Alliance this is not true. Power comes only extremely intermittently and variably and there are long periods of negligible efficiency in the long winter months when power is most needed. A 10GW wind fleet would need approximately 9.5GW of fossil capacity to guarantee its output.

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It is a very common view that “importing” foreign football players into the UK to play in the Premier League leads to less opportunity for English players to play for these teams. This means that English players get less high-level experience, and consequently aren’t as good as the players of Spain, France, Italy or Germany, who make up a larger fraction of the players playing in their home leagues. This, the argument runs, is an important factor in explaining the English national team’s perceived underperformance in international competitions. I review the literature and present novel data establishing a negative relationship between current performance (as measured by FIFA ranking) and the current amount of football played in a league by native players (across Spain, England, Germany and Italy). Further, I find no relationship between minutes played by English players in the Premier League five or ten years ago and current performance. Finally, I find strong evidence that a league’s overall strength (as measured by its UEFA coefficient) is predicted by the current amount of foreigners playing in it. To restrict foreign players would not directly benefit the English national team, but it would risk substantially curtailing the overall quality of the world’s most popular football league.

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Ben Southwood reviews the evidence around the incidence of the corporation tax, finding that more than half appears to come out of workers’ wages, with the remainder coming as an economically harmful capital tax.

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