Publications

In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastics and other recyclable materials into the country. Without the presence of China as the predominant processor of global plastic waste, over an estimated 100 million metric tons of plastic will be displaced by 2030. This is particularly significant for plastic producers, like the United States and the United Kingdom, who had previously sent a vast majority of their plastic waste to China for processing. In light of China’s ‘National Sword Policy’, these countries must find new solutions to recycle their plastic waste or take on the environmental and economic cost of plastic disposal. 

 

This joint paper examines the underlying causes of this discrepancy by isolating policies implemented in New York, Chicago, London, and Birmingham on a comparative basis. After conducting this review, this paper will explore potential policy solutions to these countries’ respective plastic problems on the local and federal levels.

This joint paper seeks to analyse the root causes of discrimination in career opportunities for various racial minorities in the UK and the US. It analyses the structural disadvantages that such minorities face before even submitting an application, such as poverty, housing, and education, and assesses the discrimination that is prevalent during the hiring process, including the surprising impact that an individual’s name has on one’s prospects.

 

The paper provides a number of policy recommendations targeted at the British and American governments, accompanied by case studies looking at Rare Recruitment and Team UPside, such as the creation of programmes to provide BME groups with tailored skills and training in conjunction with unconscious bias training. Furthermore, the paper seeks to provide recommendations to companies to tackle discrimination both prior to and during interview, such as the use of blind applications during the CV process, the use of standardised interview questions, and the payment of the real living wage to interns.

The GSPA Policy Incubator on Mental Health aims to explore mental health policies in British universities, and currently comprises two papers written by The Buchanan Institute and The Wilberforce Society. 

 

The Buchanan Institute paper sets out to review the diversity of services provided in the University of Edinburgh. It analyses each service’s self-reported ability to achieve broad goals of awareness, prevention, accessibility, and efficiency, and contrasts the results to students’ responses on whether, and how, they think the services fulfilled the criteria above. By placing students’ views at the centre of this paper, this paper hopes to contribute to the discussion on improving university mental health services by finding out what blind spots exist between the services and users, and highlights potential solutions that can tackle those problems.

 

The Wilberforce Society paper seeks to develop a generalised set of best practices which could be adopted in supporting the mental health of students in UK universities. Starting with an evaluation of mental health provisions in the University of Cambridge, including student feedback from a survey modelled after that developed by The Buchanan Institute, the paper aims to use Cambridge as a case study to identify existing strategies and propose new ones which would be most effective  in improving various aspects of students’ mental health. By providing a generalised and evidence-based model, it hopes that both university administrations will find the paper helpful in terms of helping provide the most effective support for students’ mental health.

Police officers in Chicago are disciplined for misconduct after a complaint against the officer is ruled sustained, often as a result of an investigation by an external-civilian oversight agency. Reforms to this external-civilian oversight agency occurred following the Laquan McDonald shooting; however, no rigorous statistical evidence has been produced evaluating the effectiveness of these reforms. 

 

This collaborative study aims to quantify how the race of the complainant affects the likelihood that his or her misconduct complaint is sustained by reconstructing a prior study’s multinomial logistic regression (Headley, D’Alessio, and Stolzenberg 2017). The regression will then be applied to Chicago police misconduct complaint data, obtained from the Invisible Institute, from 2008 to 2018.