Some of the biggest names in economics are joining forces to tackle challenges facing the global economy — including inequality, slow growth and changes in the nature of work.
Nobel prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence are leading the Commission on Global Economic Transformation, which is being launched at a conference in Edinburgh today.
The commission is partly a response to the tide of political populism that has swept through the West in the past 18 months, according to Spence, an economics professor at New York University.
“A wide range of economies and societies are facing difficult and challenging changes,” he said. “We keep talking about it and doing nothing. Britain is busy with Brexit, the US is busy shouting at each other. We need to deal with these issues or we will continue on this path of political polarisation.”
The commission will study issues including increased migration, climate change and the disruption to work from the rise of robots. It will produce a report in 2019 including a series of recommendations on how to tackle “problems and emerging crises in the world economy”.
Set up by the New York think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the group also includes former Financial Services Authority chief Lord (Adair) Turner, Oxfam International executive director Winnie Byanyima and Mohamed El-Erian, chief economics adviser at German insurer Allianz.
Spence said the recent improvement in the global economy should not leave any room for complacency in addressing longer-term challenges.
He argued that policymakers and economists had so far largely failed to address the concerns of those left behind by globalisation, helping to fuel the rise of divisive populists such as President Donald Trump.
“The economics profession is on a long list of things that people don’t trust,” Spence said. “We were sometimes overzealous about defending globalisation. We want to listen to the people who don’t trust the elites.”
