• Following growth of 3.4 per cent each year in 2012–14, the world economy will grow by 3.2 per cent in 2015 and 3.8 per cent in 2016.

• Growth has been slightly weaker than expected so far in 2015 and inflation remains well below target in almost all developed countries.

• But deflation does not appear to be embedded and low oil prices, combined with accommodative monetary policies, should provide a boost to growth in most oil importing countries.

• The economy will grow by 2.5 per cent in 2015, 2.4 per cent in 2016.

• Unemployment will stabilise at about 5¼ per cent.

• CPI inflation rate remains close to zero for most of the year; we do not expect interest rates to rise until the beginning of 2016.

Transfer spending among English Premier League clubs has increased drastically since the inception of the league, often funded by extremely wealthy owners who began purchasing majority stakes in clubs. Using data from the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance, we allow for different tiers of football clubs representing the haves and the have nots as well as a comparison between the first and second decades of the Premier League. Our finding that heightened spending has improved on-field performance only at the expense of hurting profitability is in line with win maximisation surmounting profit maximisation in today's Premier League.

Many small town professional clubs operate on the border of viability and threats to their survival are often real. But their activities may generate benefits that they are unable to capture in ticket sales; for example they provide a focus of interest even for some residents who do not attend the stadium. The paper presents results from applying contingent valuation methodology in two towns with clubs in the bottom-tier of English professional football. Collective willingness-to-pay for the survival of the clubs through taxation proved to be significant relative to the revenues the clubs were able to generate through ticket sales. There appears therefore to be a case for local governments to consider intervention in some circumstances where a club's survival is in question.

We analyse how a change in the probability of winning a tournament affects an agent's effort using the qualification rules for entry into the group and playoff stages of the UEFA Champions' League. Our results suggest that increasing the number of slots that a national league gets in the Champions' League leads to increases in investment in talent ex ante. This effect is largest among the teams that in the previous season just failed to qualify. This suggests that changes in prize structure leads to changes in investment decisions amongst those clubs most affected at the margin. However, we also find that incumbent teams that have already qualified for the Champions' League simultaneously raise their efforts, consistent with the occurrence of an arms race among top European football teams.

This paper examines national origin bias in professional basketball in both the North American National Basketball Association (NBA) and Spanish professional league (Liga ACB). Past studies into racial bias find mixed results. In contrast, our study provides consistent evidence that players born in the USA receive preferential treatment in both the USA and Spain in terms of receiving additional time on the court.

We examine the impact of participation in sport at secondary school on post-school pathways using a survey of Irish school-leavers, distinguishing between those who dropped out of sport during their secondary school years and those who continued playing in their final school years. We find that members of this latter group are, on completion of secondary schooling, significantly and substantially more likely to continue their education rather than to join the labour market. This effect survives controlling for individual background traits, school characteristics, attachment to the school and academic achievement. Our results are also robust to the use of propensity score matching to control for selection into participation in sport based on observable characteristics. We relate our findings to previous work on the potential labour market benefits of participation in sport and to the emerging literature on the role of consumption value in educational choice.