A confident and assertive think-tank dedicated to promoting free-market reforms.

Address: 23 Great Smith Street London SW1P 3BL
Telephone: 020 7222 4995
Email: info@adamsmith.org
Website: www.adamsmith.org

President: Dr Madsen Pirie
Director: Dr Eamonn Butler
Executive Director: Tom Clougherty
Development Director: Philip Salter
Operations Director: Steve Bettison

Part of the vanguard of free-market institutions that played a key role in the development of Thatcherism, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) has consistently carried right-wing policy from the margins to the mainstream.

Named after the Scottish economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations, its reports and publications heavily influenced the Conservative government’s agenda of privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts. The Institute’s report on taxation was central to the government’s decision to cut the top rate of income tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, and later to 40 per cent. Papers by the group were also credited with laying the intellectual foundations for the poll tax.

It has continued to press for further free-market reforms with recent reports arguing for the introduction of a flat rate of income tax.

The ASI was founded in 1977 by a group of St Andrews graduates, including Dr Madsen Pirie, who remains President of the Institute. It was he who once said of the body, “We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”

The Institute has become well known for pioneering the notion of ‘Tax Freedom Day’-the day when the average citizen has worked enough to pay all required taxes-and it now calculates this day each year.

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