ESCOE Seminar
On March 30, the Measurement in Economics Chair hosted a seminar with presentations by Rebecca Riley and Martin Weale from King’s College, who presented the work and projects of ESCOE.
The Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE) is a hub of world-leading expertise built around the analysis of emerging and future issues in measuring the economy.
Rebecca Riley is Director of the UK ESCOE. She is professor of practice in economics at King’s Business School, King’s College London. She has written extensively on UK productivity performance and labour market policy. Rebecca is a fellow of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where she previously led the productivity research group and the UK forecast team.
Martin Weale joined King’s College after six years as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and fifteen years as Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
In her presentation at PSE, Rebecca Riley explained how ESCOE is organized and described its research program, which is structured around six many themes:
1) National accounts (the emergence of big data, valuing public services quality and the third sector, globalisation);
2) Beyond GDP and inclusive wealth (democratic measures of growth, the digital economy, measuring human and cultural capital);
3) Net Zero, climate change and the environment (measuring natural capital and environmental impact, the green economy, the circular economy);
4) Productivity, innovation, business dynamics (measuring sectoral productivity, trade in value added across sectors);
5) Labor markets and households (new forms of working, new data, taxonomy of skills);
6) Subnational statistics (regional economic indicators).
Martin Weale presented the notion of democratic growth, which consists in averaging the experienced growth rate by the members of the population, and differs from the usual measure of growth of national income, which can be dubbed “plutocratic” as it weights the experienced growth of individuals by their share in the distribution of income. He also showed an estimation of lifetime equivalent income for local areas in England.
