Philippe Legrain

In an excellent piece on why Britain ought to accept more refugees, Jonathan Portes writes: As Philippe Legrain from LSE’s European Institute points out in his forthcoming paper on this topic, welcoming refugees is not only a humanitarian and legal obligation: it is an investment that can yield substantial economic dividends.

The Independent, 24 April 2014. The crisis has tipped many into disillusionment, despair and extremism – we need a European Spring.

Like passengers on an up escalator, Britons and other Europeans for decades enjoyed seemingly effortless rises in living standards year after year. Expanding economies and swelling social spending lifted nearly everyone up. Each generation could look forward to much better lives than those of previous ones. Yet in recent years, this growth escalator has broken […]

This blog post also appears on the Battle of Ideas blog on the Independent’s website. I will be speaking about mobility about the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday 30 October. I hope to see some of you there. Further, faster, cheaper, better – ever since the invention of the wheel, human progress can […]

With the X-word currently dominating the headlines, there could be no better time for this intelligent, wholly persuasive defensive of immigration. Scourging the xenophobia that sprouts at times of economic downturn, Legrain insists that clamping down on immigration is "morally wrong, economically stupid and politically unsustainable". He points out that immigrants, who usually only wish […]

One of the enduring myths about globalisation is that it is bad for the poor. Yet the facts suggest otherwise.