Abstract
The National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) is one of the oldest and most reputed policy research organisations in the UK, with roots in post-war economic decision-making and strong links with academics and economists at the Bank of England. As an organisation that produces econometric forecasts and research funded by government departments, it faced two main challenges after 2008; first, a growing mistrust of their work—even if demand for it grew—as they were seen to have failed to foresee the crisis; second, a tighter budget following cuts to public spending on research. As a result, NIESR hired a new director in 2011 who successfully raised the public profile of the organisation while expanding the types of funding it pursued. However, NIESR also faced ever more frequent challenges from defenders of the government’s austerity programme. Critics argued NIESR had become politicised, even if its researchers claimed to merely be bringing attention to the economic evidence in a public debate in which the latter was mostly absent.
Throughout this chapter, references in the format (MM/YYYY) include those of this think tank’s own academic journal, the National Institute Economic Review .
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Notes
- 1.
Although NIESR went through a hiatus during WWII, due to the concentration of economists in the war effort, it became stronger after the war (Jones, op. cit.; Robinson 05/1988).
- 2.
These include the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Germany and the Swedish Konjunkturinstitutet, founded in 1925 and 1937, respectively.
- 3.
Christopher Dow was also former Assistant Secretary General of the OECD and Fellow of the British Academy (Independent 1998).
- 4.
Bryan Hopkin was chair at the University of Cardiff and, among many other public service positions, head of the Government Economic Service and Chief Economic Advisor to the Treasury during Healey’s premiership (see Daily Telegraph 2009).
- 5.
Before joining NIESR, Christopher Saunders was Deputy Director of the Central Statistical Office, and later became Director of Research for the UN Economic Commission for Europe (Frowen 1983).
- 6.
Possibly NIESR’s first mainly academic director, David Worswick was based at the University of Oxford Institute of Statistics.
- 7.
See, for comparison, ASI top-ten positions in the same categories (Chapter 4).
- 8.
Accessed 10 October 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20101219124903/http://www.niesr.ac.uk/aboutniesr2.0.php.
- 9.
By way of contrast, the Policy Studies Institute—formerly Political and Economic Planning—a historically comparable think tank that also has a strong academic profile, depends nowadays on the University of Westminster.
- 10.
Lord Burns GCB is a life peer, former Treasury Chief Economic Advisor and former Chairman of Abbey plc (Santander bank subsidiary).
- 11.
Tim Besley CBE is Professor of Economics at the LSE, former member of the BoE MPC , and former president of the International Economic Association.
- 12.
Diane Coyle OBE is a Professor at the University of Manchester, former advisor to the Treasury, and former Vice-chairman of the BBC, and current NIESR Council Chair.
- 13.
Heather Joshi CBE is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Developmental Demography at the University of London. She is also the former Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies and of the UK Millennium Cohort Study.
- 14.
John Hills is Head of Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), LSE.
- 15.
Bronwyn Curtis OBE is former HSBC Head of Global Research and current Non-Executive Director of JP Morgan Asian Investment Trust.
- 16.
Peter Kellner is a political commentator and Head of the polling company YouGov.
- 17.
John Llewelyn is Founding Partner at Llewellyn Consulting, former Managing Director at Lehman Brothers and adviser to HM Treasury.
- 18.
This type of organisation finds parallels in the United States in the faith in positivist social sciences implicit in early twentieth century institutions such as the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and the aforementioned NBER (Medvetz 2012a).
- 19.
See NEF’s (Reid 04/2013) and ASI’s (Oliver 01/2012) in their respective chapters (III and IV).
- 20.
“The Science Arbiter seeks to stay removed from explicit considerations of policy and politics […] but recognizes that decision-makers may have specific questions that require the judgment of experts, so unlike the Pure Scientist the Science Arbiter has direct interactions with decision-makers. […] A key characteristic of the Science Arbiter is a focus on positive questions that can in principle be resolved through scientific inquiry. In principle, the Science Arbiter avoids normative questions and thus seeks to remain above the political fray” (Pielke 2007: 16).
- 21.
“Our independence is everything, our reputation for independence. So that’s something that does worry us […] if they begin to try and attack that. […] We are deliberately not aligned with any political party or any political stance. We value […] independence in our thought and […] if you’ve got core funding it’s probably increasingly more difficult to have it. But it makes fundraising easier if you have that […] income on a regular basis” (NIESR interview).
- 22.
“[I]ntervention cannot be efficacious without being equipped with all that makes expertise strong, and that opinion by itself lacks, namely, techniques, instruments, demonstrations, figures, charts, numbers” (Eyal and Levy, op. cit.: 228).
- 23.
“Once [our data] moves into the public domain then you have no control over how your message evolves. So it is very common for us to put pieces out and people to take not quite the extreme, but at times almost […] diametrically opposed views on the basis of the same piece of work. But that happens with statistics. Statistics come out from the ONS and all sorts of different messages are spun from exactly the same number. We try and be very clear in what we’re doing and how we’re interpreting our work, but […] if someone wants to use it in a certain way they will. You can put a formal piece out saying we would like to clarify that’s not what it says or ‘would you correct that,’ but once it’s out there, it’s out there” (NIESR interview).
- 24.
“From the perspective of those that work on macroeconomics at the Institute […] particularly around NiGEM […] the crisis really did change what we were working on […] Running up to the crisis we were about to undertake a major piece of work just looking at macro-level consumption functions across Europe. We’d done all the data work […] just to get things into the situation we wanted them to be. That was scrapped entirely because we weren’t going to get […] funding for it [….] so the cost of all the data work was gone. We’ve never gone back to it” (NIESR interview).
- 25.
“[After the crisis] we re-focused entirely. We started having calls from various institutions […] The Financial Services Authority as they then existed […] came to us and [said] ‘we provide you with funding, can you try and prepare a banking sector model for the UK into NIGEM that we can use?’ […] they wanted to […] gauge what impact regulatory changes to banking sector would have on the real economy” (NIESR interview).
- 26.
A risk premium is the “additional expected return that an investor requires over the return on a risk-free asset” (NIESR 11/2009: 19).
- 27.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was established in May 2010 as an advisory public body tasked with producing independent assessments of the state of British public finances.
- 28.
Accessed 17 October 2015, http://www.niesr.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/131011_171942.pdf.
- 29.
“We re-vamped the website completely, introduced a blog post, went into social media, trained all our staff in social media and Twitter and we’ve aimed to have much more of an impact, and we have had an impact. So our profile has really risen in the last few years” (NIESR interview).
- 30.
“We […] became a bit too pessimistic in the second half of 2012 into 2013 because of real world events. In particular, our 2013 forecasts were low because of data […] that were subsequently revised up quite significantly. So that led us down that path […] I find that quite interesting because people say you were just continuously pessimistic and gloomy and it’s like well, if you look at our 2012 forecasts, we weren’t that far off where the economy got to” (NIESR interview).
- 31.
“So this year and last year [2014-2015] we’ve just tried to publish a very short piece that just gives our forecast errors […] We performed better than some recent benchmark forecasts, started comparing ourselves to a few other institutions […]. So we’ve not done [forecast error analyses] at the level of detail the OBR, the IMF, or the OECD have, which is fine because they’ve got the resources to do it […] It is a resource question. It would be nice for us to do that, but no one is going to provide the funding for us to […]. We may be able to carve out the time gradually over the years to look at that, but that’s a luxury that I’m envious of” (NIESR interview).
- 32.
See (accessed 13 October 2015) http://www.pcc.org.uk/advanced_search.html?keywords=jonathan+portes&page=1&num=10&publication=x&decision=x&image.x=0&image.y=0.
- 33.
Accessed 1 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBC0mLFz91o.
- 34.
“[On government department research] the competition has increased because there’s a lot of different organisations now bidding for that kind of work, which there weren’t in the past” (NIESR interview).
- 35.
Denham and Garnett argue a rift between NIESR and government had already happened in the Thatcher years: “[a] new low point […] was reached in the early 1980s, when […] NIESR, which generally favoured growth, confronted a government which had committed itself to a policy which deepened an already serious recession” (Denham and Garnett 1998: 78).
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González Hernando, M. (2019). The National Institute of Economic and Social Research: The Shifting Fortunes of Expert Arbiters. In: British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20370-2_5
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