Briefing/External Publications
Findings from POID's academic research are first published in our open-access discussion paper series. Our briefing papers provide a synthesis of key facts and insights. We also publish in peer-reviewed academic journals and produce blogs and reports.
All Briefing/External Publications
CEP report
Skills for growth: what the UK can learn from international approaches for incentivising employer-based training
This report reviews international evidence on approaches to increasing employer investment in training, focusing on three broad models: coordination between employers and training providers; sector-based employment and t...Read more
Aadya Bahl, Sandra McNally and Anna Valero
23 September 2026
CEP report
Catalysing climate resilience
The UK is experiencing increasing impacts from climate change, including more frequent and severe floods, heatwaves and storms. It needs to prepare more for these impacts. It also needs to honour its pledge to support cl...Read more
Raffaele Della Croce, Daisy Jameson, Maxwell Read, Esin Serin and Anna Valero
14 May 2026
CEP report
Pathways to a productive and inclusive net zero
The transition to net zero can bring economic benefits - improving productivity and living standards while tackling climate change and this collection of briefing papers shows how. Pathways to productive and inclusive ne...Read more
Pia Andres, Chiara Cavaglia, Sam Fankhauser, Ilya Ilin, Francois Lafond, Fulvia Marotta, Ralf Martin, Sandra McNally, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Alice Owen, Emilien Ravigne, Maxwell Read, Xiyu Ren, Misato Sato, Aurelien Saussay, Arjun Shah, Trang Thu Tran, Anna Valero, Guglielmo Ventura, Dennis Verhoeven, Francesco Vona and Golvine de Rochambeau
13 February 2026
CEP report
The innovation race on geological carbon removal: who is best placed to lead?
This report analyses innovation activity represented by patenting data for two carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies - bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACC...Read more
Josh Burke, Siyu Feng, Maxwell Read, Esin Serin and Ram Smaran Suresh Kumar
9 July 2025
CEP report
Innovation through crises in the 2020s: survey evidence on digital, AI and net zero innovation in UK firms
In this policy brief, we present new data from a survey of 373 UK firms conducted in May 2024 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). This is a follow-up to our two earlier surveys which revealed...Read more
Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Bruno Serra-Lorenzo and Anna Valero
2 April 2025
CEP report
The green industrial policy matrix: Informing an industrial strategy for clean energy technologies
This paper presents new evidence to inform industrial strategy prioritisation of clean energy technologies in the UK. It focuses on seven technology categories relevant for reducing emissions across power, heat and indus...Read more
Pia Andres, Ralf Martin, Maxwell Read, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah and Anna Valero
25 November 2024
CEP election analysis
Energy and climate change
The scale of change and investment required for net zero is challenging, but early action is the most cost-effective way to achieve the 2050 target and could bring opportunities....Read more
Leo Mercer, Esin Serin and Anna Valero
3 July 2024
POID Briefing Paper
Management matters in an era of disruption
The Covid-19 pandemic, military tensions and associated supply chain stress have meant that the past few years have been an era of high disruption. How can management help firms through such turbulent times?...Read more
Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Olivia Marques, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur, Marcos Todeschini and John Van Reenen
13 June 2024
CEP election analysis
Growth and productivity
The collapse in productivity growth underlies many of the problems of the UK economy ? from squeezed public services to stagnant living standards. Productivity growth in the UK has been weak relative to its own past and...Read more
Anna Valero and John Van Reenen
12 June 2024
External report
Labour Economics: Thinking through Labour's economic agenda
With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an...Read more
Timothy Besley, Aveek Bhattacharya, Jagjit Chadha, Paul Cheshire, Neil Lee, Alan Manning, Andrew McNeil, Margarida Bandeira Morais, Henry G. Overman, David Soskice, Anna Valero, Giles Wilkes and Alison Wolf
22 April 2024
CEP report
Boosting growth and productivity in the United Kingdom through investments in the sustainable economy
It is now widely accepted that the UK has a major productivity growth problem, with chronic underinvestment across both the public and private sectors being a key cause. Continued low public investment, as laid out in th...Read more
Esin Serin, Nicholas Stern, Anna Valero, John Van Reenen, Bob Ward and Dimitri Zenghelis
22 January 2024
CEP report
A new UK policy institution for growth and productivity: A blueprint
The UK has experienced 15 years of poor productivity performance relative to its own past and relative to its peers. Analysis of the UK's productivity problem points towards many contributing factors, discussed in this v...Read more
Anna Valero and Bart van Ark
27 November 2023
CEP report
Cracking the Productivity Code: An international comparison of UK productivity
We examine the growth and level of UK productivity compared to France, Germany and the US. There has been a marked slowdown in labour productivity growth: comparing the dozen years before vs. after the Global Financial C...Read more
John Van Reenen and Xuyi Yang
27 November 2023
POID Briefing Paper
A new UK policy institution for growth and productivity: A blueprint
The UK has experienced 15 years of poor productivity performance relative to its own past and relative to its peers. Analysis of the UK's productivity problem points towards many contributing factors, discussed in this v...Read more
Anna Valero and Bart van Ark
27 November 2023
External report
Finance for the future
The UK Government has an opportunity to mobilise far greater amounts of private investment for public policy priorities than is the case now. Blended finance, deployed well, offers a tried and tested pathway for public a...Read more
Sarah Gordon and Anna Valero
26 October 2023
External report
Learning to grow: how to situate a skills strategy in an economic strategy
Investing in human capital is a crucial aspect of building an economy that is both more productive and fairer, and any growth strategy must incorporate an agenda for increasing human capital and workforce skills within t...Read more
Rui Costa, Sandra McNally, Louise Murphy, Christopher A. Pissarides, Bertha Rohenkohl, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura
24 October 2023
External report
Ready for change
Britain's productivity shortfall is its foundational economic problem. Debate about this gap and how to fix it typically focus on raising productivity of existing firms, via two routes. First, innovation: investment, R&D...Read more
Richard Davies, Nadim Hamdan and Gregory Thwaites
25 September 2023
External report
Beyond boosterism
The UK is a low investment nation. Low business investment is a big driver of this. Low investment is one reason behind the UK's weak productivity growth, which in turn is the main reason behind the stagnation in UK livi...Read more
Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero
22 June 2023
CEP report
Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from tidal stream energy in the UK
This is the decade for managing the immense risks of climate change, and delivery on net zero. That means rapidly increasing the share of renewable sources in our energy mix alongside a step-change in energy and resource...Read more
Pia Andres, Ralf Martin, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah and Anna Valero
22 June 2023
External report
Net zero jobs
The Government's commitment to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will mean investment, and change, across the economy: from the decarbonisation of buildings and surface transport, to shifts in diet, avi...Read more
Molly Broome, Stefano Cellini, Kathleen Henehan, Charlie McCurdy, Capucine Riom, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura
20 June 2022
External report
Growing clean
This report, the 19th report for The Economy 2030 Inquiry, provides a hard-headed assessment of the opportunities presented to UK plc by the move to net zero, and considers how best these can be unlocked. It does this by...Read more
Brendan Curran, Ralf Martin, Sabrina Muller, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah, Anna Valero and Dennis Verhoeven
23 May 2022
External report
Enduring strengths
A decade of stagnant living standards, weak productivity and low investment combined with a coming decade of major change - driven by Covid-19, Brexit and Net Zero - mean that it is crucial for the UK to renew its econom...Read more
Josh De Lyon, Ralf Martin, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Arjun Shah, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero
28 April 2022
External report
Business time
The UK is set for a decade of major change, with private sector firms in the front line. How ready are they for this change? What form should policy towards business take within a new economic strategy for the UK? This r...Read more
Jesse Kozler, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Pablo Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero
15 November 2021
CEP Covid-19 analysis
The business response to Covid-19 one year on: findings from the second wave of the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption
We present new data from a survey of 425 UK businesses conducted in July 2021 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which seeks to understand the ways in which firms have innovated one year on ...Read more
Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero
10 November 2021
CEP report
Are 'green' jobs good jobs?
The transition to net-zero will have far-reaching but unequal effects, as 'dirty' jobs disappear while new jobs aligned with or supportive of the net-zero objective - which we refer to as 'green' - are created. As govern...Read more
Mirko Draca, Jiaqi Li, Sabrina Muller, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero
28 October 2021
External report
The carbon crunch
This report is the launch paper for the net zero strand of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, a joint project between the Resolution Foundation and the London School of Economics. It outlines how net zero can be placed at the cen...Read more
Jonathan Marshall and Anna Valero
30 September 2021
CEP report
Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from carbon capture, usage and storage in the UK
Seizing opportunities from the CCUS value chain can be part of an economy-wide, net-zero-aligned growth path in the UK. The UK has responded to the climate emergency facing the world with an economy-wide target to reach...Read more
Pia Andres, Ralf Martin, Penny Mealy, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah and Anna Valero
22 September 2021
External report
The UK's decisive decade: the launch report for The Economy 2030 Inquiry
This report marks the launch of The Economy 2030 Inquiry, a landmark collaboration between the Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, funded by the Nuffield Found...Read more
Torsten Bell, Swati Dhingra, Stephen Machin, Charlie McCurdy, Henry G. Overman, Gregory Thwaites, Daniel Tomlinson and Anna Valero
18 May 2021
CEP Covid-19 analysis
A major wave of UK business closures by April 2021? The scale of the problem and what can be done
This report presents an analysis of the financial health of UK businesses, which shows that immediate action is needed to prevent a wave of corporate failure in early April. We cannot delay action. Now is also the moment...Read more
Peter Lambert and John Van Reenen
27 January 2021
CEP Covid-19 analysis
Innovation for a strong and sustainable recovery
In the recovery from Covid-19, innovation and diffusion will be key to addressing several structural challenges facing the UK economy. These include improving the UKi??s longstanding poor productivity performance, addres...Read more
Ralf Martin, Sam Unsworth, Anna Valero and Dennis Verhoeven
18 December 2020
CEP Covid-19 analysis
Jobs for a strong and sustainable recovery from Covid-19
The UK's future economic, social and environmental prosperity will be shaped by how it deals with, and recovers from, the impact of Covid-19. This paper sets out coordinated net-zero-aligned investments which the UK can ...Read more
Pia Andres, Giorgia Cecchinato, Penny Mealy, Charlotte Taylor, Sam Unsworth and Anna Valero
19 October 2020
CEP Covid-19 analysis
The business response to Covid-19: the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption
We present new data from a survey of 375 UK businesses conducted in July 2020 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which seeks to understand the way in which firms have innovated in response t...Read more
Capucine Riom and Anna Valero
30 September 2020