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This paper describes and evaluates a recent innovative project in Liverpool that brought together the skills and creative vision of a major national museums group in partnership with the housing action trust. ‘City Memories’ created opportunities for older people to take part in reminiscence activities at the museums and in a large extra care housing setting in the community. Training was provided for community leaders, care home managers and care workers in order to help them apply some of the ideas in their own work. The project looked at outcomes for older people who participated in terms of increased stimulus and sense of well‐being, with a special focus on those with conditions such as stroke and dementia. It is hoped that such work will inspire others to put therapeutic reminiscence into practice in their own settings and circumstances; and that it may be possible at some stage to conduct a more systematic study to test the benefits of this approach in relation to measurable health gain.

The chapter presents emerging evidence on the development of the platform economy, paying particular attention to the motivations for entering platform work, the conditions of platform work, and the extent of social protections afforded platform workers. Debate thus far has tended to be highly speculative and lacking in grounded empirical analysis, with policy-makers in particular actively looking to regulate platform work on the basis of its novelty as a form of employment within the wider context of the decline of the “standard employment relationship.” The chapter explores such concerns through an analysis of European Union labor market data and a unique data-set of circa 1,200 online “click workers” across four established platforms. A novel contribution of the analysis is to differentiate between those that only work on platforms (work-dependent platform workers) and those that do such work in addition to another job. The analysis suggests that work-dependent platform workers are more likely to be differentiated by their motivations for doing such work than their experiences of job quality or access to social protections. However, the relationship between platform working and levels of social protection is complex, notably in terms of combined level of social protection and the contractual arrangement of additional job holders. This leaves us to conclude that policy initiatives designed to address gaps in social protections for platform workers would be more appropriately targeted toward problems of insecure work more broadly. Finally, a number of areas for future research are outlined.

This paper investigates the extent to which country risk ratings influence the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI). Using International Monetary Fund (IMF) data from over 100 countries and Euromoney’s country risk ratings over a ten‐year period, this study finds that country risk ratings have a significant influence on FDI. This effect is stronger for US FDI. We also analyze the relative importance of the individual components of the country risk index.