 Brexit demonstrates a number of profound issues about democracy in terms of many of the issues that might have motivated people to vote for Leave may well actually transcend the UK's membership of the European Union. In some cases this isn't necessarily the case. So, there is a school of thought, a more political economy-based school of thought, which suggests that those who voted Leave for issues associated with, for example, the European Union's perhaps ordoliberalism or neoliberalism and its potential impact on labour markets, for example, may well be those who suffer most as a consequence of this. My name's Professor Robert McMaster. I'm at the University of Glasgow's Adam Smith Business School. I'm currently working with colleagues at Glasgow and elsewhere, developing an economic democracy index. What we endeavour to do is just to contribute to the debate on the use of indices as indicators of economic social wellbeing. What we're endeavouring to do by this is generate ideas about economic democracy, broaden the notion of economic democracy beyond the workplace and interrogating and investigating potential relationships between economic democracy and, for example, productivity, poverty, income inequality, growth and so forth. OECD and the European Commission have issued guidance on the construction of composite indices. What we've endeavour to do is follow this as closely as possible. As a consequence of this, we've been confined to the use of particularly reliable datasets, so the data that we use is mainly relating to OECD member states. So I'm afraid for the moment we're confined to OECD member states just on the basis of data reliability. Even there we've had to exclude two OECD member states simply because of data issues. Economic Democracy Index has revealed quite marked and pronounced differences between Scandinavian economies and mainland European economies who rank fairly highly, relatively speaking. And there's another group of economies founded in Eastern Europe which rank more modestly. Anglo-American economies, primarily the UK and US, also rank relatively modestly and in our latest sample or iteration of the index we find that the US is ranked 32 out of 32, which is interesting in itself. There are some changes over time, but in terms of those groups of economies, they tend to be fairly consistent in that the Scandinavian economies tend to perform relatively well, vis-a-vis other types of capitalist or economic systems. Differences and placements may arise as a result of waiting that's applied as part of the index, so some economies do relatively well, for example in what we call associational democracy, economic democracy, which refers to collective organisations. So, for example, Ireland performs well in terms of financial cooperatives, which we've deemed more democratic than other forms of financial enterprise and trade union density. The UK doesn't perform that well across the range as we understand it. In terms of the Economic Democracy Index, what we've found is a very mixed picture before and after the financial crisis, with some economies actually performing better post financial crisis than they did beforehand. We've yet to investigate the potential reasons why that may well be, others haven't performed that well, Greece certainly hasn't performed that well post financial crisis. I think we need to investigate further in terms of qualitative data, so interviews with key academic players, other types of stakeholders, politicians, trade unionists, civil society. We've endeavoured to do that in three economies, Portugal, Slovenia and Denmark in order to interrogate their performance, a relative performance in the Economic Democracy Index. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to do that for a wider set, so anything I say about an economy's movements has to be couched with a good deal of caution and we have to look at essentially the historical factors and cultural factors that may contribute to this. What we've endeavoured to do is investigate potential relationships with poverty, with inequality in particular and with productivity. What we find is with income inequality there's quite a pronounced correlation, so the higher the Economic Democracy Index, the lower the levels of income inequality. What we've done since establishing this correlation is trying to investigate possibilities of causation and we find that there is a robust causal relationship. Again, we're trying to develop our analysis in this. In terms of factor productivity, we also find a positive correlation between Economic Democracy and labour productivity, certainly as it's conventionally measured. And the same with poverty levels that the higher the levels of economic democracy, the lower the measurable poverty levels as assessed by the gene coefficient. In terms of policy implications of the Economic Democracy Index, in those economies that perform relatively well in the EDI, they also perform relatively well in a range of other indexes such as Human Development Index. The array of institutions and endeavouring to democratise them implies that people react fairly well to having a voice and being able to participate in decision making processes. We've attracted some interest in terms of, for example, the Chief Economist of the Scottish Government has expressed interest in various other organisations such as Oxfam, New Economics Foundation and so forth have expressed interest in exploring the policy implications with us. Perhaps one of the policy implications would be in terms of, well, the conventional organisation of firms lending greater voice to employees might well be highly beneficial. Also beyond that greater financial diversity, for example, may well contribute to democratising of the economy and have beneficial implications. In terms of predicting the impact of Brexit, economic tools aren't really adequate because they're dealing with a profound uncertainty and something that is potentially transformational of the UK economy. There are important challenges for economists and how they contribute to this debate and indeed prior to the referendum some economists in the British Government Treasury were forecasting essentially an apocalypse post referendum if there was a leave vote which there was and of course that hasn't happened. What is certainly happening is that growth is slowing incomes are falling relatively speaking because of changes in exchange rates but nothing on the scale that was predicted by some. I think Brexit has the potential to transform the UK economy in ways that could exacerbate income inequalities and existing poverty levels. It sends a very, very bad signal to the rest of the world. It's not xenophobic but it's certainly inward looking so there are a number of challenges presented by Brexit. I'm also concerned about climate change and the lack of action that seems to be taking place in terms of that certainly in a global scale. There are many instances of local initiatives that appear to be bearing fruit but I remain sceptical of buying from the major powers.