A list of key issues and topics under each priority:

Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth

The key issues under this priority area are grouped under three headings, as follows:

Determinants of Economic Performance and Growth

• Innovation, both technological and organisational
• Cultural, especially fostering entrepreneurship
• Provision of a highly skilled workforce
• Provision of infrastructure to underpin productivity and competitiveness
• Improving performance and productivity of the public sector
• Securing economic advantage for the UK from emerging markets.

Sustainability of Economic Performance and Growth (sustainability in the environmental, financial and social sense)

• How to move to a low carbon economy
• Global competition from growing economies for resources
• Demographic changes, ageing, fertility and migration
• Connections between economic activity and wider human welfare and wellbeing
• The spread of economic performance across places and by sector.

Stability of Economic Performance and Growth

• Effective modelling of the linkages between the financial and other sectors of the economy
• Effects of perceptions of risk (overlap with the priority area of Influencing Behaviour and Informing Interventions)
• Relationship of macro-economic and micro-economic behaviour
• Behavioural analysis and modelling (overlap with second key priority area)
• Expectations formation and the behaviour of goods and asset markets, particularly the transmission mechanisms that might link such markets such as housing
• Global poverty alleviation (overlap with Vibrant and Fair Society).

Influencing Behaviour and Informing Interventions

The key issues are:

• Linked lives - how individual decisions are influenced by the interplay of the child, the family, community and wider world
• Role of technology in influencing behaviour (overlap with topic in key priority area of Vibrant and Fair Society)
• Motivation to change - effects of incentive programmes e.g. on savings
• Environmental change - behavioural change
• Community conflict - interventions to reduce conflict
• Perception of risk (overlap with the key priority area of Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth)
• Agents of change in organisational settings and processes.

Four other topic areas were identified under this heading:

• Early Years - tracking through the life course, which should enable effective use of major datasets
• Later Years - how to increase participation in the older years
• Health/Education Inequalities in Lifestyles - smoking, obesity, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases; lack of exercise; How to improve child and health outcomes?
• How social and economic decision making relates to individual intrinsic difference and biological influences (making use of new opportunities for analysis from linkage of social and biomedical data).

Vibrant and Fair Society

The priority areas are grouped under the following three headings:

Civic Engagement

The key issues are:

• Is there a problem of civic engagement in contemporary democracies?
• Localism - what are the roles and impacts of community-level organisations, local governments, voluntary sector organisations/social enterprises, and private sector providers? Who gives time as well as money and why? What makes for organisational effectiveness in community-level organisations?
• Technology - how far does online social networking replicate conventional forms of civic engagement (overlap with topic under the key priority area of Influencing Behaviour and Informing Interventions)?

Inequality

The key issues are:

• Regional economic disparities, especially an international comparative perspective
• Understanding the effects of public sector austerity on inequalities
• The consequences of the changing nature of employment
• Inequalities of 'wellbeing'.

International Society

The key issues are:

• Environmental justice
• International 'resilience' / 'disasters across borders'
• Rising Powers - there is an opportunity here for a 'multi-level' analysis of 'vibrant and fair society' (overlap with the key priority area of Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth).