It is difficult to answer the counterfactual "what if real wage growth was higher, then what would have employment been" because both are jointly determined and depend on other driving forces. Moreover, wage growth is definitely not a policy variable.
Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
This is a much higher bar than the previous question, since it suggest that quarter-to-quarter, or at least year-to-year, measures in happiness should guide the fine tuning of policies. (This is what I understood as macroeconomic policies, as opposed to long-run investments, which were covered in the previous question). For higher frequencies, I am not convinced that the signal-to-noise in the happiness measures is large enough to be a good indicator.
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?
There has been remarkable progress in this area in the past two decades. In the same way that measures of health (infant mortality), inequality (Gini coefficients), absolute poverty (poverty rates) and others affect policy, it seems that measures of happiness may also be considered. They should be in the list of a few dozen indicators that policymakers keep in mind. All of these are complements to GDP though, not substitutes.
Same answer as to the previous question, although my impression was that the literature is less kind to regional policies relative to industrial policies.
Research on this topic seems to me to be quite inconclusive, with some evidence for some positive returns (https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp1113.html or https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20120103), and other evidence for neutral or negative effects (http://voxeu.org/article/surprising-prevalence-surprises-export-specialisation or http://www.nber.org/papers/w18694). If a new industrial policy is adopted, then it is probably wise to keep it modest and use recent research to design it effectively.
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).
Wages and economic recoveries
====================================================================
Question 1: Do you agree that lower real wage growth was beneficial for employment levels during the Great Recession?
====================================================================
Happiness and well-being as objectives of macro policy
====================================================================
Question 2: Do you agree that quantitative well-being analysis should play an important role in guiding policy makers in determining macroeconomic policies?
====================================================================
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 ?
====================================================================
Question 2: Do you agree that the UK needs a new regional policy?
====================================================================
====================================================================
Question 1: Do you agree that the UK needs a new industrial policy?
====================================================================
Pages