Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
I think the study of well being is an interesting field, and perhaps useful for assessing the quality of delivery of key public services like health and social care, where one can measure well being for an individual before and afterward. But I don't feel that the measures are instructive enough to be targets for macro policy instruments.
Question 1: Do you agree that subjective well-being measures, or at least some of the subindices from the typical survey measures, are now reliable enough to give useful insights when used in macroeconomic empirical analysis?
They are interesting enough to give us insights into how they relate to macro measures, but not yet, in my view, useful for policy analysis. In other words, I would not yet want to invite policy makers to put any weight on these measures as against stabilising resource utilization conventionally measured.
Agree in two respects. First that regional policy should emerge from a kind of social insurance, in that market incompleteness and social justice demand that we don't force individuals to bear all the costs of volatilty in the regional distribution of jobs and income. And second, that there can be coordination and network effects in whether a region is prosperous or not [see literature on Chicago, and clusters] which government policy instruments may be able to affect.
The only sense in which I agree is that I worry that the edifice of regional funds, and discretion over business rates means that we have a non-neutral industrial policy already, which I'm against, for conventional reasons. Would prefer limited state capacity and resources to be directed towards providing public goods better and more efficiently, including, relevant here, vocational education and regional infrastructure.
The CFM surveys informs the public about the views held by prominent economists based in Europe on important macroeconomic and public policy questions. Some surveys focus specifically on the UK economy (as the CFM is a UK research centre), but surveys can in principle focus on any macroeconomic question for any region. The surveys shed light on the extent to which there is agreement or disagreement among these experts. An important motivation for the survey is to give a more comprehensive overview of the beliefs held by economists and in particular to include the views of those economists whose opinions are not frequently heard in public debates.
Questions mainly focus on macroeconomic and public policy topics. Although there are some questions that focus specifically on the UK economy, the setup of the survey is much broader and considers questions related to other countries/regions and also considers questions not tied to a specific economy.
The surveys are done in collaboration with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Happiness and well-being as objectives of macro policy
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Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
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Question 1: Do you agree that subjective well-being measures, or at least some of the subindices from the typical survey measures, are now reliable enough to give useful insights when used in macroeconomic empirical analysis?
A “new” UK industrial strategy ?
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Question 2: Do you agree that the UK needs a new regional policy?
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Question 1: Do you agree that the UK needs a new industrial policy?
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National Living Wage and the UK economy
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Question 2: Do you agree that the new NLW will have a muted effect on wages and prices?
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