1981, BA (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Brasenose College, Oxford; 1987, MA; 1983, AM and 1985, PhD in Economics, Harvard Univ. 1981-85, Research Assistant, Nat'l Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge; 1985-86, Senior Economic Assistant, HM Treasury; 1986-88, Senior Economist, DRI Europe; 1988-89, Intern, The Economist; 1989-93, European Editor, Investors Chronicle. The Independent 1993- 2001. Founder, Enlightenment Economics. Professor of Economics, University of Manchester. Member of Council, Royal Economic Society; Trustee of Centre for Economic Policy, NIESR, ProBono Economics & CORE Economics. Member of American Economic Association and Society of Business Economists. Fellow Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce. Author of numerous publications inc. GDP, A Brief But Affectionate History. OBE, 2009.
This has been a brutal year, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing governments around the world to close down many aspects of normal everyday life while supporting workers and businesses wit...
The word “productivity” typically calls to mind industrial assembly lines pumping out cars or washing machines, breakfast cereal or shoes. The word may also conjure images of crops being ...
Do we know how economies develop? Obviously not, it seems, or otherwise every country would be doing better than it currently is in these low-growth times. In fact, cases of sustained rap...
Mainstream economics has largely failed to keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformation, and it is struggling to find practical ways to address the growing power of dominant tech...
Is the world becoming increasingly prosperous? It would be hard to answer “yes” right now, at least so far as the leading high-income economies are concerned. Yet the longstanding bellwet...
In 1831, when Charles Darwin boarded The Beagle for its five-year voyage of exploration, ships navigated with the help of chronometers, which showed the precise time at a reference locati...
One of the striking changes any rich-world traveler to low-income countries cannot fail to have missed during the past decade or so is the rapid spread of mobile phone use, followed now b...
The idea that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is inadequate as a measure of economic well-being dates back to the 1960s, when environmentalists and feminist scholars pointed out some obvious...
Se suponía que la elección que acaba de tener lugar en el Reino Unido iba a arrojar -como decía el eslogan de campaña del Partido Conservador- un gobierno "fuerte y estable". Terminó cons...
Watch a Special Address by Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2017 here.
Globalisation, far from making the world flat, has thrown into sharper relief economic inequalities. It has made the geography of economic activity more rather than less salient.
Britain’s tallest mountain is Ben Nevis in Scotland. Recently, it became one metre taller, standing now at 1 345m rather than 1 344m above sea level. Of course, the mountain did not actua...
Is Africa poor? Yes, compared to other regions of the world. But this apparently straightforward question is harder to answer than it seems. This shows why the technicalities involved in ...
One headline indicator dominates public debate about the health or otherwise of the economy, and that is growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Since it was first developed as an international standard in the 1940s, the System of National Accounts, and particularly the definition of GDP, has been subject to debate. Areas of conte...
