Contributors

Jonathan is responsible for the production and transformation of economic statistics and analysis at the Office for National Statistics, as well as leadership across the wider Government Statistical Service. This includes important statistics on the national accounts, inflation, trade, employment and unemployment, wages, productivity, and various other measures of the wealth of the UK.

Jonathan joined the ONS in June 2015, leading the production and transformation of economic statistics. Before joining the ONS, Jonathan worked at Her Majesty’s Treasury for 14 years on a range of economic and policy issues, including changes to the tax and benefits system, National Health Service and social care, and the fiscal and macroeconomic policy framework. Jonathan was also Departmental Chief Economist at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Giuliana is a Professor of the Economics of Innovation at Warwick Business School. She has been researching, teaching and advising on statistics, industrial economics and policy for the past 25 years. She is particularly interested in the generation, uptake (productivity and adoption) and the economic impact of innovations. Her research has been supported by over 14 grants. She held visiting professorships in the USA and mainland Europe.

Giuliana is the co-director of the GRP Productivity and the Futures of Work of the University of Warwick; the co-chair of the British Network of Industrial Economists; a Fellow, member of the Economics Experts Working group of the Office for National Statistics and a member of the Council (2016-19) and of the National Statistics Advisory Group of the Royal Statistical Society.

Giuliana has been advising and doing consultancy for various organisations and governments, including the Business Energy and Industrial Strategy department of the UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Italy; the Research Institute on Financial Structure and Economic Development (ISFSE); the Bank of England, the European Commission DG-REA Research & Innovation, the Institute of Perspective Technological studies and EUROSTAT; the Research Councils of Canada, Israel, France, Italy and Portugal.

Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book, ‘Markets, State and People – Economics for Public Policy’ examines how societies reach decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources.

Her research focuses on the digital economy and digital policy. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an adviser to the Competition and Markets Authority, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council.

She has served in a number of public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was previously Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours.

Sumit joined the Government Economic Service (GES) in 2005. Sumit is a Senior Economist at the Office for National Statistics, principally working as a UK macroeconomist. Sumit has previously worked in the Department for Business, Cabinet Office and HM Treasury. His work included conducting analysis of the current conjuncture of the UK economy, producing input into economic forecasting, providing advice to Ministers and senior officials on trends and developments and helping to develop the evidence base around policy options.

Joe Grice spent most of his career at Her Majesty’s Treasury, his last posts there being as Director of Macroeconomic Policy and then as Chief Economist and Director, Public Services. He moved to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2004 and functioned as the Chief Economist and Executive Director for Economic, Labour market and Social Statistics. Since 2016, he has been the Chairman of the ONS’s Group of Economic Experts – senior members of the economics profession, appointed after open competition, to give ONS greater access to external economic expertise. Joe was elected to the Council of the Royal Economic Society in 2010 and holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Chicago.

Gareth has 20 years’ experience at ONS, with the majority of that time spent in the Methodology area. His expertise is in survey design, sampling and weighting, and he has worked on the development of many and varied business and social outputs, including the methodology for implementation and transition to the current industrial classification. Prior to joining ONS, Gareth completed his PhD at Cardiff University and taught there.

His current role is as head of Health Methods Analysis within the Methodology & Quality Directorate at ONS, which has seen leadership of the methodological input to the office’s many studies on COVID-19. Gareth continues to provide advice on a range of methodological challenges across GSS outputs.

Robert Joyce is a Deputy Director at the Institute for Fiscal studies and he leads its Income, Work and Welfare research programme. His research focuses on inequality and poverty, particularly in the labour market, and the role of policies such as taxes and welfare in addressing them. He has written and spoken widely about inequality, advised the Equality and Human Rights Commission and sat on the Social Metrics Commission. He is currently on the Expert Panel of “The IFS Deaton Review: Inequalities in the 21st Century”, which is the most ambitious project of its kind yet attempted, aiming to form a holistic understanding of inequalities and what to do about them.

François Lequiller is a statistician-economist with a double career: first with Insee, the French statistical office, where he has been head of price statistics and national accounts, and second, with international economic organisations such as the IMF, the OECD and Eurostat. In the latter, Lequiller was the head of government finance statistics during the euro crisis. He is well known in the world of national accountants for having published the OECD manual “Understanding National Accounts”, which has been translated in French, Spanish, Chinese and Georgian! He has recently published “Déficit et dette en temps de crise” (Economica, 2018) in which he relates his experience as head of European GFS.

An economist and statistician of long and varied experience, Jill Leyland has been deeply involved in the debate over inflation indices since the events of 2010. At the time, she was a vice president of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and chaired its advisory policy group on official statistics, thus leading the Society’s work on the issue. Leyland was instrumental in setting up the RPI CPI Users Group in 2011. Along with one other, she developed the concepts underpinning the household costs indices, which are now being further developed by the Office for National Statistics.

Jill Leyland has been a member of the Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices (Stakeholder) since its inception and was a member of the ONS Economic Experts Working Party from 2016 to 2018.

Josh Martin is the Head of Productivity at the Office for National Statistics, where he has been an Economic Advisor since 2016. He is an expert in measuring capital and multi-factor productivity, and previously produced public service productivity statistics. He also previously led ONS work on firm-level productivity analysis, measuring intangible assets, as well as work developing new statistics of infrastructure, and wider work on capital stocks and capital services, and the digital economy. Josh has published numerous articles on intangibles assets, and contributed to updated estimates of investment in own-account software and entertainment, literary and artistic original assets in the National Accounts. He has published on intangible assets in the August 2019 special issue of the National Institute Economic Review, on measuring the modern economy in an ESCoE discussion paper in 2019, and regularly speaks at conferences on productivity and intangible assets.

Craig McLaren is currently Divisional Director of the National Accounts area within the Office for National Statistics in the UK. His teams are responsible for the measurement of UK GDP, supply-and-use tables, regional and sector financial accounts; and also a dedicated set of weekly real-time economic indicators. Craig has previously worked at the OECD, Australian Bureau of Statistics and with the IMF. Craig has over 20 years’ experience in official statistics, including a PhD in Statistics. Craig has published numerous articles on sample survey design, time series analysis and economic issues.

Stuart Newman is an Economic Advisor at the Office for National Statistics and author of Britain by Numbers, A Visual Exploration of People and Place. He currently heads the Multi-Factor Productivity team at the ONS and has worked with economic data in various areas of the ONS for the past six years.

Prior to starting at the ONS, Stuart worked as a financial journalist, headed membership communications for the Chartered Financial Analyst Society of the UK and worked in data sales and marketing for Nikkei Europe. His career has allowed him to build extensive experience of compiling, using and communicating data in various guises.

In a previous life he taught English as a foreign language in Japan and China and wrote for expat magazines in Shanghai.

Mary O’Mahony is Professor of Applied Economics at Kings College London. She is a member of the management team of the economic statistics centre of excellence (ESCoE), a member of the productivity Institute and was previously a Fellow of the office for National Statistics. Her research interests are in measuring and explaining international comparative productivity. She was a founding member of the EU KLEMS consortium, and has coordinated or participated in many EU and UK funded projects in this area. Her recent research relates to measuring intangible assets and human capital accumulation and their impacts on economic activities.

She was a member of the council of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) up to 2020 and is on the editorial board of the Association’s journal The Review of Income and Wealth. She is a member of the NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. In 2021 she joined the technical advisory group for the World Bank’s International Comparison Program.

Richard Prothero is Head of the Centre for Subnational Analysis at the Office for National Statistics. Educated at the London School of Economics, Imperial College and UCL, Richard spent the first decade of his career working in private sector economic consultancy roles. He then entered the public sector with GLA Economics working on a range of economic topics for the Greater London Authority and London Development Agency before joining the Office for National Statistics in February 2010. Initially leading a new regional economic analysis team at ONS, Richard now heads the multi-disciplinary Centre for Subnational Analysis which brings together economics, statistics, social research and geography to produce new subnational data and analysis to inform policymaking. Richard chairs both the GSS Regional and Geography Committee and the ONS Combined Authority Liaison Group and is the UK delegate at the OECD Working Party for Territorial Indicators.

Nikki Shearman is currently an assistant deputy director in the Central Policy Secretariat of the UK Statistics Authority, with responsibility for International Relations. Previously she was head of the ONS legal team and for 15 years has played a leading role in the development of the UK’s statistical legal framework. She is also the chair of the UNECE taskforce on Modernising Statistical Legislation and represents the UK at many other International fora.

After gaining his doctorate in 1970, Peter Sinclair was immediately appointed as a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1994, he became professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham and in 2000 was appointed as Director of the Bank of England’s Centre for Central Bank Studies. He published widely, particularly in the field of international economics, and with a special interest in environmental policy. He acted as a consultant and adviser to numerous governments around the world. Appointed as an ONS Fellow in 2016, Peter sadly succumbed to Covid-19 in March 2020, in the last stages of revising the chapters he contributed to this book.

Paul Stoneman is currently a Professor Emeritus, having formerly been Lecturer and Reader in the Economics Department and Research Professor in Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Stanford University, and a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has a first degree in Economics from Warwick, a Masters degree from LSE and a Ph.D from Cambridge. His research interests encompass the analysis and measurement of the determinants and effects of technological change in current and historical perspectives with a particular emphasis on the factors affecting the speed of diffusion of new technology, and the role of government policy in the technical change process. He has published widely in this field and is noted particularly for a number of authored, co- authored or edited books upon the Economics of innovation and technological change. He has been an adviser to governments, international governmental organisations and private sector companies on innovation, productivity and performance. He is a former member of the Competition Appeals Tribunal.

Paul Swinney is Director of Policy and Research at the independent think tank Centre for Cities, where he oversees the research programme and strategy of the Centre. He has published on a wide range of subjects relating to city economies, including the development of UK cities over time, the role that city centres play in the national economy and the geography of the UK’s productivity troubles.

He is a regular regional and national media commentator, including print, radio and TV, and speaks at conferences across the UK on subjects relating to the performance of city economies.

Martin Weale is Professor of Economics at King’s College, London. A member of the Monetary Policy Committee from 2010 to 2016 and former Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, he has worked on a range of issues associated with economic measurement throughout his career. A particular interest has been the reconciliation of inconsistent national accounting data; he has also worked on the treatment of exhaustible resources and the interpretation of income. Recent work has looked at business surveys and, in particular, at the measures of expectations that they collect. He was a member of the Statistics Commission from 2000 to 2008. He is currently a member of the Technical Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices and of the ONS Economic Experts Working Group.

Jonathan is responsible for the production and transformation of economic statistics and analysis at the Office for National Statistics, as well as leadership across the wider Government Statistical Service. This includes important statistics on the national accounts, inflation, trade, employment and unemployment, wages, productivity, and various other measures of the wealth of the UK.

Jonathan joined the ONS in June 2015, leading the production and transformation of economic statistics. Before joining the ONS, Jonathan worked at Her Majesty’s Treasury for 14 years on a range of economic and policy issues, including changes to the tax and benefits system, National Health Service and social care, and the fiscal and macroeconomic policy framework. Jonathan was also Departmental Chief Economist at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Sumit joined the Government Economic Service (GES) in 2005. Sumit is a Senior Economist at the Office for National Statistics, principally working as a UK macroeconomist. Sumit has previously worked in the Department for Business, Cabinet Office and HM Treasury. His work included conducting analysis of the current conjuncture of the UK economy, producing input into economic forecasting, providing advice to Ministers and senior officials on trends and developments and helping to develop the evidence base around policy options.

Joe Grice spent most of his career at Her Majesty’s Treasury, his last posts there being as Director of Macroeconomic Policy and then as Chief Economist and Director, Public Services. He moved to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2004 and functioned as the Chief Economist and Executive Director for Economic, Labour market and Social Statistics. Since 2016, he has been the Chairman of the ONS’s Group of Economic Experts – senior members of the economics profession, appointed after open competition, to give ONS greater access to external economic expertise. Joe was elected to the Council of the Royal Economic Society in 2010 and holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Chicago.

Ed Palmer is Deputy Chief Economist and head of Analysis, Microdata and Engagement at the Office for National Statistics. Ed joined the ONS from the Department for Transport where he was head of Rail Analysis for seven years. Previous to this he worked as a government economist at the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Department for Trade and Industry. Ed also worked in economics consulting for nine years, at Coopers & Lybrand, PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM. He has economics degrees from the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Georgia is an Engagement and Educational Resources Lead working in the Economic Statistics Group within Office for National Statistics (ONS). Georgia leads a series of projects focussing on providing resources and educational activities for Schools and Universities. Georgia joined ONS in 2000 and has had a career mostly in external stakeholder engagement, talent pipelining and promoting ONS to a wider audience. Georgia is Project Manager for ‘Measuring the Economy’.