Diane Coyle

Commentary: Modernising Economic Statistics: Why It Matters

In the Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom for 1871–1885, most of the 200 pages provide great detail on trade in agricultural products, including from the colonies, and the public finances (HMSO, 1986). There are just twelve pages on factories, mines and railways. So at the height of the Industrial Revolution official statistics provided scant information about the dynamic manufacturing economy. The reader can find monthly sales of corn in English and Welsh market towns, or the volume of guano and gutta percha imported into the United Kingdom, but rather little about factories other than their number, employment and – to be fair – the number of power looms and spindles installed.

Precarious and Productive work in the digital economy

Digital platforms have the potential to create benefits for their suppliers or workers as well as their customers, yet there is a heated debate about the character of this work and whether the platforms should be more heavily regulated. Beyond the high-profile global platforms, the technology is contributing to changing patterns of work. Yet the existing framework of employment legislation and public policy more broadly – from minimum wages to benefits and pensions – is structured around the concept of ‘the firm’ as the agent of policy delivery. To reshape policies in order to protect the interests of people as workers as well as consumers, it is important to understand why digital innovators make the choices they do, and therefore how labour market policies can improve working conditions without constraining the productivity and consumer benefits enabled by digital business models.

The paradox of popularity in economics

This special issue collects papers presented at the EIPE Conference ‘Economics Made Fun in the Face of the Economic Crisis’ held on 10–11 December 2010 in Rotterdam. The central theme of the conference was the tension between the bold claim in Economics Made Fun books that economics can explain the hidden side of everything and the apparent failure of economics to foresee, let alone prevent the financial crisis. Economics is understandably unpopular as a subject because of the financial crisis, and yet the popular appetite for economics seems only to have increased in recent years. In this Introduction to the special issue I want to explore some reasons that might explain this paradox.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers

Ann Pettifor has several targets in her sights in this short book: bankers of course, and a rival group of ‘heterodox’ economists, but above all ‘orthodox’ economists. A high profile campaigner and...

All to play for in measuring the economy

A surprising new genre of non-fiction has emerged in the past three years: books about gross domestic product (GDP) and national accounts. These range from popular explainers aimed at business page readers (such as Zachary Karabell’s (2014) The Leading Indications) to the scholarly. The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm by Matthias Schmelzer is at the latter end. The book starts with the historical territory covered by this literature: the early efforts by Simon Kuznets in the US and Colin Clark in the UK to develop aggregate measures of ‘the economy’; then the subsequent development of gross national product (and later GDP) during the Second World War. The pre-war and wartime approaches differed in two fundamental ways. First, Kuznets and Clark had wanted a measure of total economic welfare, rather than just activity, whereas John Maynard Keynes and US officials including Milton Gilbert needed the latter. Secondly, the wartime aggregate embedded Keynes’s new macroeconomic theory and was intended to provide the measure of the success of demand management policy. Schmelzer writes:

Making the most of platforms: A policy research agenda

Digital platforms are proliferating in many countries and many sectors of the economy. Platforms create immense value, for their customers and also for their suppliers. Yet all too often they are seen only through the lens of the ‘disruption’ of incumbents, resulting in a narrow debate about whether platforms should be more heavily regulated. Yet the right questions are: what policy framework will ensure the immense benefits are encouraged and widely shared; what will help create new platforms, and sustain healthy competition and innovation; and how can unwelcome aspects of platform behaviour be avoided? This paper gives a broad overview of theory and evidence to date on digital platforms and aims to set out the issues that remain to be addressed by researchers, policymakers, and the platform businesses themselves. The distinctive economic characteristics of platforms, their global scope and their rapid evolution make for a rapidly-changing landscape in which traditional policy tools and business strategies do not apply, and there are many questions to be answered.