The privatised rail system relies upon billions of pounds of hidden subsidies from the tax payer and has failed to bring in private investment, according to research from the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Six in ten people over the age of 50 in the UK have not considered how they will finance their retirement years – and a third of people approaching retirement do not know how much income they will receive from their private pensions, according to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Warwick and Director of the ESRC Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, examines how the economic policies of the Thatcher era affected the UK economy.

Professor David Newberry argues that public investment in the right areas will fuel UK economic growth - with the short-term impact of giving work to domestic private companies who will create jobs.

More government borrowing and public sector job cuts, as tax rises are on the horizon, warns the IFS Green Budget.

While employment levels in the UK have been "remarkably robust" since 2008, productivity has slumped, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies paper The productivity puzzles.

Investing in human capital, improving the national infrastructure, improving finance provision for private investment and innovation, and the creation of an independent National Growth Council are key recommendations in the final report from the LSE Growth Commission.

A new ESRC-funded project chronicles the stories of those who choose to disappear and become a missing person. The findings will be used to train police, inform government policy and design services to support those who disappear and their families.

The Great British Public Toilet Map has been developed as part of an ESRC-funded research project Tackling Ageing Continence through Theory Tools and Technology (TACT3), automatically tracking councils' open data on public toilet facilities and displaying the information online.

The newly published figures from the 2011 census show that the population of England and Wales increased with 7 per cent – 3.7 million – over the last decade. This is the largest jump in population figures since the first census in 1801.