LSE Blogs

The #China-#Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has become a major diplomatic event, and increasingly Africa is able to guide the agenda to shape cooperative outcomes. The ninth session emphasised an upgraded "all-weather" partnership, $50 billion in diversified funding, green development initiatives, and alignment with African priorities like Agenda 2063. Read more from Tom Baxter and Yuezhou Yang on the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa blog 👉 https://ow.ly/koJc50Uhw7c

Is there a misalignment between EU cohesion policy and the EU’s industrial policy? 🇪🇺🏭 Tea Gamtkitsulashvili and Vassilis Monastiriotis (LSE European Institute and Hellenic Observatory) write on LSE European Politics and Policy that while the former targets less developed areas of the EU, the latter aids well-developed regions. They argue for a move towards a more spatially aware, regionally inclusive industrial policy framework that would allow the EU to target areas with untapped growth potential.

"[Employees inter-organisational mobility] has always bothered organisations. During the pandemic, the phenomenon took a more evocative name: the Great Resignation." Investing in employee training and development doesn’t always produce straightforward effects. #Workers change jobs for a number of reasons and organisations bear the costs of recruitment and retraining. Alessandro Lo Presti, Assunta De Rosa and Beatrice van der Heijden researched how to enhance the knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable workers to perform effectively and whether a tendency to change workplaces could hamper this goal. Read more on LSE Business Review 👇

To make real headway in tackling the #ClimateCrisis, is it time to move away from #GDP and towards more holistic composite indicators created by social scientists? Amaia Palencia Esteban and Pedro Salas Rojo for the LSE International Inequalities Institute blog 👇

What is a “social impact scholar”? Having a positive impact beyond academia can often be seen as a requirement, rather than as a personal orientation to research and its potential to create #SocialChange. John Wilcox (Alethic Innovations) and Brandon Reynante (Haas Center For Public Service) reflect on their experience as social #impact scholars and what it means for their research. LSE Impact Blog

Are key deals made over lunch instead of in the boardroom?🥪🤝 Lunch breaks during #meetings have become an increasingly important setting for confidential discussions between #EU leaders 🇪🇺 write Mareike Kleine (LSE European Institute) and Samuel Huntington (UK Department for Science) on LSE European Politics and Policy. But while these discussions make it easier to reach agreements, they raise critical questions about the trade-off between transparency and confidentiality in EU and global governance.

How can we conceptualise the toll that #Care work takes on people and the planet? Despite the essential nature of reproductive work, it is often underpaid or unpaid and its distribution across society is starkly gendered and racialised. A new book by Shirin Rai (SOAS University of London) exposes the hidden human costs of care work and offers "depletion" as a framework for understanding these costs in context. According to Shalini Grover (LSE International Inequalities Institute)'s #review on LSE Review of Books, few studies have captured the costs of social reproduction and their anticipatory harms in such a comprehensive, nuanced manner or offered such a compelling vision for a transformational #feminist politics of care.

The Terminally Ill Adults or #EndofLife Bill will be voted on in the #UK parliament on 29 November. A number of arguments are being raised as to why the Bill should be voted down, including concerns over the vulnerability of the terminally ill, a worry about a “slippery slope” that sees the eventual expansion of the Bill’s scope, an argument over the poor state of the NHS and palliative care. On LSE British Politics and Policy, Emily Jackson (LSE Law School) makes the case for why those arguments aren’t good enough to warrant blocking the Bill.

"We see the prize as having the same overall objective as the FT: curating the news for busy businesspeople." According to Andrew Hill, the best #business #books are those that successfully bridge the divide between academia and businesspeople and avoid getting swept up in hype cycles or trapped in following the dogma of endlessly recycled bad ideas. He spoke to Martin C.W. Walker about the history, purpose and 2024 shortlist of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award to mark its 20th year.

“We tend to forget the extent to which space is so integral to our daily lives.” Read an interview with Dimitrios Stroikos (LSE IDEAS) on LSE European Politics and Policy about the future of #SpaceExploration and how conflicts between states are now playing out in space.🚀🛰👇