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Pakistan is a country which is facing chronic trade deficit since its independence and currency devaluation have always remained an effective strategy to bridge this gap between imports and exports. Previous studies which assessed the influence of changes in exchange rate on Pakistan’s trade balance followed a symmetric or linear approach. However, in this study we adopt an asymmetric approach, according to which appreciations and depreciations have asymmetric effects on the trade balance of Pakistan. Using commodity trade data of 28 (2-digits) industries that trade between Pakistan and United Kingdom, we find pattern of the J-curve in nine industries when a linear model was estimated. However, when we estimated a nonlinear model, the concept of asymmetric J-curve was supported in 14 industries. The largest industry (clothing) which engages in 36.5% of the trade was found to benefit from rupee depreciation.

Despite the popularity of motivation research in the latter half of the twentieth century, little empirical evidence exists of the factors influencing the motivation of different occupational groups within the construction industry. Furthermore, no significant attempt has been made to compare the job motivation level difference of the employees working in large companies or small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This research attempts to fill these knowledge gaps by exploring the motivation of members of three occupational groups (professional engineers, skilled trade-craft workers and unskilled or semi-skilled general operatives), working for a variety of SMEs and large sized businesses. The findings reveal that professional employees are predominantly motivated by intrinsic reward, which contrasts markedly with unskilled workers who demonstrate a desire for extrinsic rewards. However, company size does not appear to affect the motivation of any of the groups studied significantly.

This study explored the impact of income inequality, household energy consumption, government expenditure, and investment on carbon dioxide emissions at the household level over the period 1970–2015 in the United Kingdom. The study applied Clemente–Montanes–Reyes unit root test to identify structural break in the time series. Further, the cointegrating relationship of the time series observations was explored by applying the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) (linear) bounds test approach along with the nonlinear ARDL for making fruitful comparisons in the long-run relationship among the variables. The paper used Bayer–Hanck combined cointegration method for robustness test in the cointegrating methods. In addition, the causality analysis was explored using the Toda–Yamato (1995) method of Granger causality. The results confirmed the existence of cointegration among the variables.The estimated NARDL results show that in the long run the negative asymmetric impact of the income inequality is stronger than the positive impact. The paper concludes that there is an urgent need to reduce income inequality in the United Kingdom to improve equitable consumption of energy at the household level. Last the causality test shows that there exists unidirectional causality from inequality transmission to carbon emissions.

This paper looks at issues in the formation of the United Kingdom’s policy toward China during a period of growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China, focusing particularly on the relationship between policy debates and the output of UK-based think tanks on China. By analyzing the policy debate and think tank output on three current key themes, including maritime politics in the South China Sea, whether to allow Chinese companies to participate or invest in “critical national infrastructure,” and China’s suspected “interference” in other countries’ domestic politics, this paper shows that UK-based think tanks tend to prioritize security concerns more than economic opportunities with regard to the UK’s China policy. Nevertheless, the impact of U.S.-China tensions and of policy advocacy and research on the UK is issue-dependent.

This paper examines the dynamic impact of both bank-based and market-based financial development on economic growth in the United Kingdom (UK) during the period 1980–2012, using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach. Given the complexity of the financial structure in the United Kingdom, various financial development indicators have been used to construct bank-based and market-based financial development indices. The empirical results of this study show that while market-based financial development has a positive impact on economic growth in the United Kingdom, bank-based financial development has a distinct negative impact. These results apply irrespective of whether the regression analysis is conducted in the long run or in the short run.

In this paper, the IMF's new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the relative importance of a number of factors argued to explain the differences in the trends in core inflation and relative prices in the United Kingdom, the Euro area and the United States. The simulation results indicate that although the direct effect of globalization has had a larger effect in the United Kingdom than in either the United States or the Euro area, it explains only a portion of how the developments and U.K. specific factors played an important role.