Progressive Economics 2023
10 June, full-day event from 9am-6.30pm
University of Greenwich, 10 Stockwell Street, SE10 9BD
The Progressive Economy Forum (PEF) and the University of Greenwich research Centre of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability bring you Progressive Economics 2023 – a conference of debate and education at a vital moment in the UK to debate the policies to tackle the alarming economic challenges of austerity, inequalities, Brexit, Covid-19, cost-of-living crisis, global supply problems, the war in Ukraine, care crisis and environmental collapse. What are the solutions and how to persuade the policy makers to implement them? There will be panels on green caring just transition, inequalities, cost-of-living crisis, economics of the commons, Brexit, fiscal policy, monetary policy, industrial policy and macroeconomic policy coordination with MPs, academics, and researchers from think-tanks and civil society organisations.
This page gives an overview of the panels and provides speakers' background. Please find the up-to-date programme for the event here.
Opening Plenary – Policies for a Green Caring Just Transition: What Is To Be Done? (10_0003, 9.45-11.00)
Lord Robert Skidelsky is a crossbench peer, one of Britain’s foremost economic historians and a key voice in contemporary economic and political debates. His special expertise is in the historic role of fiscal policy in advanced economies and the rise, fall and return of Keynesian economics. He is the author of many books, including his famous three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) – winner of five literary prizes – and, most recently, Money and Government: A challenge to mainstream economics (2018) which makes the case for putting theories of money and government at the centre of economics. In 1991, he was made a life peer in the House of Lords. Robert has dedicated great effort to increasing public understanding of economic issues, writing many articles in free publications and creating an open online course in partnership with the Institute for New Economics Thinking on the history and philosophy of economics.
Patrick Allen is the founder, chair and principal funder of the Progressive Economy Forum. He is also a solicitor and the Senior Partner of Hodge Jones & Allen, a law firm specialising in human rights which he founded in 1977. Alongside his successful career in the law, Patrick has a long-standing interest in macroeconomics and decided to create the Progressive Economy Form in 2018 to oppose the policies of neoliberalism, especially the programme of austerity introduced in the UK from 2010, and to provide alternatives. PEF brings together progressive economists , academics and politicians to analyse the failure of neoliberalism, the futility of austerity , and to draft credible, Keynesian-inspired policies to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Özlem Onaran is Professor of Economics at the University of Greenwich, the co-director of the Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability, and Associate Head of School of Accounting, Finance and Economics for Research. She has done extensive research on issues of inequalities, growth, employment, fiscal policy, green economy, care economy and gender. She has directed research projects for the UN International Labour Organisation, UNCTAD, ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics, ITUC, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, the Vienna Chamber of Labour, the Austrian Science Foundation, and Unions21. She is member of the Council of the Progressive Economy Forum, Scientific Committee of the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, Scientific Advisory Board of Hans Boeckler Foundation, and the Policy Advisory Group of the Women’s Budget Group, member of the Coordinating Committee of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies, and a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has more than ninety articles in books and leading peer reviewed journals such as Cambridge Journal of Economics, Feminist Economics, World Development, Environment and Planning A, Socio-Economic Review, Development and Change, Public Choice, Economic Inquiry, European Journal of Industrial Relations, International Review of Applied Economics, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Eastern European Economics, and Review of Political Economy. There are 5749 citations to her work in Google Scholar, and 1427 citations in SCOPUS. She is ranked in the top 3.2% (in the last 10 years) of economists worldwide in REPEC.
Closing Plenary – Rebuilding the Country with Progressive Economics (11_0003, 17.15-18.30)
Ann Pettifor is a political economist, author and public speaker. Her work and writing has concentrated on sovereign, corporate and private debt and the international financial architecture. Her most recent book, The Production of Money (Verso, 2017) explains the nature of money and the monetary system; tackles thorny issues like Bitcoin and QE, and is written to be accessible to a wide audience. She is well known for her leadership of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which as part of an international movement resulted ultimately in the cancellation of approximately $100bn of debt owed by the world’s poorest countries. In 2003 she edited the New Economics Foundation’s The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave) with a prescient sub-title “the legacy of globalisation: debt and deflation”. In 2006 Palgrave published her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis. In 2008 she co-authored The Green New Deal and in 2010 co-authored an essay with Professor Victoria Chick: “The economic consequences of Mr. Osborne”. Her next book The Case for the Green New Deal (Verso) will be released in Autumn 2019. She is the director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME). She tweets @AnnPettifor.
Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He was previously a professor for a decade at the University of Sheffield, and before then a professor at the University of Leeds. In 2020 he published “Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives and in 2021, jointly with Annika Koljonen: Finntopia: what we can learn from the world’s happiest country. In September 2023 his new book on the UK is published by Verso, titled: ‘Shattered Nation: Inequality, and the geography of a failing state’. Danny is a patron of the road crash charity RoadPeace, and in his spare time he makes sandcastles.
John McDonnell has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Hayes and Harlington since 1997. From 2015 to 2020 he was Labour’s Shadow Chancellor developing the radical, transformative economic programme for Labour’s 2017 and 2019 election manifestos. Throughout his period in Parliament he has focused on advocating policies to secure a shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working class people, particularly through the reform of trade union rights and the extension of universal basic rights and services and alternative forms of ownership. In a recent project, “Claim the Future,” he has brought together researchers, think tanks and campaigners in a series of seminars, lectures, podcasts and conferences to assist in the promotion of radical ideas and support action to confront the continuing hegemony of neoliberalism and tackle the challenges of inequality and climate change. Before his election to Parliament John had the relatively unique experience of being both a civil servant and elected politician in local government. As a civil servant he was the chief executive of the Association of London Government and as a politician he was the deputy leader and chair of Finance of the Greater London Council. Prior to this role in London government he was a trade union officer at the TUC and the Nation al Union of Mineworkers and a production worker on the shopfloor.
Guy Standing is an economist and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He previously held chairs at SOAS and the universities of Bath (UK) and Monash (Australia). These followed a long career at the International Labour Organization, where he was Director of its Socio-Economic Security Programme and, earlier, of its Labour Market Policies Branch. His current research interests centre on basic income (he is a founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an NGO promoting basic income as a right), the plunder of the commons and how to revive them, and rentier capitalism and the growth of the precariat. Recent books include Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017); The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (2016); A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014); and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011).
Policies for a Just Transition I (11_0003, 11.15-12.45)
Susan Himmelweit is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Open University. She is a feminist economist whose research focuses on intra-household inequalities, the economics and policy of caring and the gender implications of economic and social policy. She is the coordinator of the policy advisory group of the Women’s Budget Group, the UK’s gender budgeting think tank, and was its founding chair. She is a member of many advisory bodies including the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Expert Group on “Making Fair Financial Decisions” and of UCL’s Commission on Mission-Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy. In 2009, she was the President of the International Association for Feminist Economics and is on the Editorial Board of its journal Feminist Economics. She is co-editor of Economics and Austerity in Europe: Gendered impacts and Sustainable Alternatives.
Rebekah Diski is a freelance researcher and currently doing a PhD on work and workers in the green transition at Warwick University. She previously worked on just transition projects at NEF and on the Women’s Budget Group’s Feminist Green New Deal, where she also sits in the Policy Advisory Group.
Will Hutton is co-chair of the Purposeful Company. He was principal of Hertford College Oxford from 2015- 2020 and co-founded of the Big Innovation Centre. He is a political economist and a columnist for the Observer, where he was Editor, then Editor-in-Chief for four years. Will’s best-known book is probably The State We’re In, one of the top-selling books on political economy since 1945. Since then he has published prominently on a wide range of topics, with titles including The State to Come; On the Edge: Essays on a Runaway World (with Anthony Giddens), an analysis of globalisation; and The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century. His next book Them and Us – an examination of fairness and due desert in driving vigorous market economies – was published in 2010, and the forward-looking How Good We Can Be in 2015. His latest book Saving Britain: How We Can Prosper in a New European Future (co-authored with Andrew Adonis) was released in June 2018. He tweets @williamnhutton.
Policies for a Just Transition II (11_0003, 13.45-15.15)
Katie Kedward is an economist at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, with a research focus on sustainable finance. Katie started her career in capital markets at the Royal Bank of Canada, as a government bond and derivative specialist. Prior to joining UCL, she worked in green banking at ShareAction, the responsible investment NGO, and as a researcher for George Monbiot, focusing on sustainable food systems. Katie holds an MSc degree in ecological economics from the University of Leeds and a First Class degree from the University of Cambridge. She has contributed to publications such as LSE Business Review, Open Democracy, and Brave New Europe. Katie sits on the advisory panel for Positive Money UK, an NGO campaigning for a fair, democratic, and sustainable financial system.
David Barmes leads Positive Money’s research on green central banking, growth dependency, and the wellbeing economy, while contributing to our work on various other topics including macroeconomic policy coordination and the economic response to Covid-19. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Psychology from McGill University and a master’s degree in Socio-Ecological Economics & Policy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. David has previously worked on projects in environmental politics, environmental conflict, and ecological macroeconomics.
Yannis Dafermos is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. He is also the Research & Knowledge Exchange Convenor of the SOAS Department of Economics, a Senior Fellow at the SOAS Centre for Sustainable Finance and a Fellow at the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM). His research interests lie in financial macroeconomics, climate finance, ecological macroeconomics, climate-aligned development and inequality. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Ecological Economics, Environment and Planning A, the Journal of Financial Stability, Nature Climate Change and New Political Economy. He has worked as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on projects funded, amongst others, by the ClimateWorks Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council, and has run capacity building programmes on climate change for several central banks. He is a Committee member of the Post-Keynesian Economics Society (PKES) and a Council member of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE).
Policies for a Just Transition III (11_0003, 15.30-17.00)
Maria Nikolaidi is an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Greenwich. She is also a Fellow at the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM). Her research areas include macrofinancial policies, ecological macroeconomics and financial fragility. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Ecological Economics, the Journal of Financial Stability, the Journal of Economic Surveys and Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. She has worked on research projects on ecological macroeconomic modelling, the greening of monetary policy and the links between income distribution and growth. At the University of Greenwich, she teaches macroeconomics, political economy and banking & finance. She is a member of the committee of the Post-Keynesian Economics Society (PKES) and a Trustee of the Foundation for European Economic Development (FEED).
Lorena Lombardozzi is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Open University. She is Co-Director of IKD: Innovation, Knowledge and Development Research Centre. She completed her PhD thesis in Economics at SOAS, University of London (fully funded by SOAS Economics dpt.) with a title ‘A nexus between the role of the state, market transition and food consumption: The case of Uzbekistan’. Lorena holds a MSc from SOAS in Political Economy of Development (fully-funded). She received a previous Masters in Development Economics from University La Sapienza of Rome, Italy. Before returning to academia Lorena worked as a development economist in Latin America in 2014, in Uzbekistan for the regional office of UNODC in Central Asia from 2010 to 2012, and between 2007 and 2010 with the European Commission and the Italian Ministry of Foreign affairs in the field of development economics, international trade and environmental policy. Her research interests relate to the theoretical debates on political economy, inequality, growth and distribution as well as to applied areas of international development (Central Asia in particular), gender and feminist economics, labour and work, the welfare state and social policy, agro-industrial policy and innovation, food systems, global value chains and research methods in Economics.
Josh Ryan-Collins has been at UCL since 2017 and has been Head of Research for IIPP and is currently Departmental Graduate Tutor (Director of the PhD program). He is a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum, a think tank of made up of eminent economists advocating for improved macroeconomic policy in the UK. Previously Josh was a Senior Economist and Head of the Finance program with the New Economics Foundation (NEF), one of the UK’s leading progressive think tanks. He was also a founding member of the Brixton Pound local currency.
Fiscal and Monetary Policy (11_0004, 11.15-12.45)
Geoff Tily is an economist. He joined the TUC in 2014 as Senior Economist, following 25 years as a member of the government statistical and then economic services, involved throughout in the production and interpretation of macroeconomic statistics and the National Accounts. Mainly based at the Office for National Statistics, he also had a couple of stints in HM Treasury, including in the macro team over the early years of austerity (2010-2014). He researched his PhD with Victoria Chick at UCL. In his book Keynes Betrayed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) he argues that Keynes’s primary concern was monetary mechanisms to avoid recession, with fiscal policy to resolve recession in second place. He tweets at @geofftily.
Robert Calvert Jump is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability at the University of Greenwich. He teaches quantitative methods and macroeconomics, and previously taught at SOAS, University of London, Kingston University, and UWE Bristol.
Shreya Nanda is the Chief Economist at the Social Market Foundation, where she leads the organisation’s economic policy work. Prior to this, she was an economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and a government economist. She has published research on wide range of UK domestic policy areas, including macroeconomics, fiscal policy, and housing and transport. She is an advisor to Tax Justice UK, the Women’s Budget Group, London YIMBY, and Taxing the Rich, as well as a spokesperson for the New Economy Organisers Network. She regularly appears in national print and broadcast media.
Macroeconomic Policy Coordination (11_0004, 13.45-15.15)
Stephany Griffith-Jones (Banco Central de Chile) is an economist researching development finance – in particular, national, regional and multilateral development banks – and the reform of national and international finance from a development perspective. She is the Financial Markets Program Director at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Senior Research Associate of the Overseas Development Institute and Emeritus Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She has published widely, having written or edited over 25 books and many more articles. Her book Time for a Visible Hand, co-edited with Jose Antonio Ocampo and Joseph Stiglitz, was published by OUP in 2010, and her most recent book The Future of Development Banks (also co-edited with Jose Antonio Ocampo) was published by OUP in 2018. She advises many international organisations, including the European Parliament, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, various UN agencies and several governments. She tweets @stephanygj.
Jo Michell is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He studied Economics at SOAS before joining UWE Bristol. His research interests include macroeconomics, finance and development. He is Chair of the Post-Keynesian Economics Society and a Fellow of the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policy of the Hans-Böckler Foundation. He has published on macroeconomics and finance in journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics and Metroeconomica.
James Meadway is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum council and host of the Macrodose podcast. His new book, The Cost Living Crisis (and how to get out of it) is out now from Verso.
Post-Brexit Britain (11_0004, 15.30-17.00)
Molly Scott Cato is Professor of Green Economics at Roehampton University where she researches sustainable finance and how to build a sustainable economy. Between 2014 and 2020 Molly represented South West England in the European Parliament where she worked on sustainable finance, regenerative agriculture, and trade policy. Aside from her work as an economist Molly’s areas of special interest include land ownership and food production; renewable energy, especially when it is owned by local communities; co-operatives; and issues concerned with peace and opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Molly studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University and later gained a doctorate in economics from Aberystwyth.
Peter Holmes is an Emeritus Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex and an expert on global trade and EU integration. He taught Economics at Sussex from 1974 to 2020, and has been a visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and Warsaw for many years. He has written on the interface of trade competition regulation and industrial policy. He has conducted research for the European Commission and the World Bank, and given evidence on the WTO, Brexit and Freeports to parliamentary committees. He is regularly quoted by media outlets in the UK and internationally.
Gerhard Schnyder (PhD University of Lausanne; Switzerland) is currently Professor of International Management & Political Economy at Loughborough University London and since 2019 the Director of the Institute for International Management. He is also a research associate at the Centre for Business Research (CBR), University of Cambridge. Gerhard’s work focuses on state-business relationships in particular in right-wing populist settings. He is leading a NORFACE-funded international research project on te populist backlash against globalization and democratic backsliding in Europe and beyond (grant no 462-19-080 – popback.org project). His work has been published in internationally leading journals including Business & Society, Comparative Political Studies, Organization Studies, and Global Strategy Journal.
Rising Inequalities (SL101, 11.15-12.45)
Faiza Shaheen is an economist, commentator and prospective parliamentary candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Prior to this, Faiza was Head of Inequality and Sustainable Development at Save the Children UK, where she led on the development of a new global campaign on inequalities in child outcomes, and Senior Researcher on economic inequality at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Faiza is a frequent commentator on social and economic issues in national print and broadcast media, and she has worked with Channel 4 and the BBC to develop documentaries on inequality. Prior to her work for think tanks, her economics PhD charted the changing geography of poverty between 1971 and 2001 in the UK, and modelled the economic, demographic and societal factors driving these trends. In 2017, Faiza was named the Observer Rising Star for Campaigning, nominated as Asian Woman of the Year and included in the Top 100 Influencers on the Left list. She tweets @faizashaheen.
Ben Tippet is a lecturer in economics based at the Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability. Prior to joining Greenwich, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at King’s College London on the Leverhulme-funded project 'The Political Economy of Growth Models in an Age of Stagnation'. His research focuses on wealth inequality, housing, debt, secular stagnation and political economy. He is author of Split: Class Divides Uncovered(Pluto Press, 2020)
Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow in the School of Policy Studies, the University of Bristol, a Research Associate at the Compass think-tank and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has written widely on poverty, wealth and inequality and is the author of The Richer, the Poorer, How Britain enriched the few and failed the poor, a 200-year history (Bristol University Press), A Sharing Economy (2016), Breadline Britain, The Rise of Mass Poverty (with Joanna Mack, 2015) and The Cost of Inequality (2011).
Inflation and Cost of Living Crisis (SL101, 13.45-15.15)
Carys Roberts is the executive director of IPPR. Prior to taking up the role, she was the chief economist and head of the Centre for Economic Justice at IPPR. Carys was a key contributor to the final report of the Commission on Economic Justice, Prosperity and Justice, leading on the analysis in the report and recommendations relating to wealth, automation and labour markets. Carys has appeared on national and regional broadcast media, including Radio 4, Radio 5Live, Talk Radio, LBC, BBC Breakfast and Sky All Out Politics. She has written for a range of online and print publications, including for the Guardian, and her research has generated front-page headlines. She sits on the editorial advisory board of the journal Renewal, and is a member of the advisory group for Rebuilding Macroeconomics as well as the steering group of the Economic Change Unit. Carys joined IPPR in 2015. She previously worked at the RSA, the Social Mobility Foundation, the IFS and in charity impact evaluation. She holds an MSc Social Policy (Research) from LSE, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University.
Alexander Guschanski is a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Greenwich and a member of the Centre of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability. He publishes on income distribution at the industry and firm level, unemployment and trade imbalances. He has been part of the Network for Pluralist Economics since its founding days and has written for various think tanks and civil society organisations such as Unite the Union, the New Economic Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Fabian Society.
Jan Toporowski is Professor of Economics and Finance at SOAS University of London and a member of the Council of the Progressive Economy Forum. He has published widely on monetary theory and policy, finance, and macroeconomics, including two volumes of biography of Michał Kalecki. After studying economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the University of Birmingham, UK, Jan Toporowski worked in fund management, international banking, and central banking. He has been a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, The Africa Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Alternative Industrial Policy (SL101, 15.30-17.00)
Mehmet Ugur is professor of Economics and Institutions at the University of Greenwich. His work focuses on the interactions between institutional quality, innovation policy, and economic outcomes such as firm dynamics, market power, income distribution, and employment. He has led research projects funded by the European Commission, the Department for International Development (DFID), and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Mehmet has method specialism in meta-analysis, a quantitative method of evidence synthesis in economics and public policy. He is a member of the Meta-Analysis of Economic Research Network (MAER-Net); and has also acted as co-convenor for the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations Economics Methods Group (CCEMG) from 2010-2015. Currently, he is Deputy Director of the Centre for Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability (PEGFA) at the Greenwich Business School.
Janet Williamson is a Senior Policy Officer at the TUC and leads the TUC’s work on corporate governance and collective bargaining. She has written widely on corporate governance, worker directors, executive pay, employee share ownership, shareholder engagement and collective bargaining, producing many TUC reports and submissions and other publications. Janet is a member of the Wates Private Sector Coalition Group; the Corporate Governance Committee of the ICAEW; and the Cambridge University Centre for Business Research Advisory Board. Janet is also the founder and Chair of Trade Union Share Owners, a group of trade union investors who collaborate on voting at company AGMs and on investor engagement strategies.
Michael Jacobs is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sheffield. An environmental and macroeconomist, his research focuses on post-neoliberal economic theory and policy, and on climate change and industrial strategy. Michael was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers at the Treasury from 2004-7, and Special Adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2007-10. He worked with the French Government, UN Secretary General and others on the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. He directed the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice from 2016-18 and was principal author of its final report Prosperity and Justice. His other books include The Green Economy (1991), Paying for Progress: A New Politics of Tax for Public Spending (2000), and Rethinking Capitalism (ed, with Mariana Mazzucato, 2016).
