Citizens' Economic Council

Rain Newton-Smith leads the team which provides economic analysis and our prestigious surveys. She was most recently head of Emerging Markets at Oxford Economics where she managed a large team of economists and was the lead expert on China. She provided macroeconomic forecasts and analysis on China's role in the global economy and the development of Asia, helping a range of companies and international financial institutions to expand into new markets and grow their business. Prior to that, Rain worked in monetary policy and international forecast to the MPC at the Bank of England where she led a team with responsibility for developing a risk assessment framework for the UK financial system. While at the Bank, she also went on secondment to the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. where she was adviser to the UK executive director. In 2010, Rain was selected as one of Management Today’s 35 Women Under 35. Rain was honoured by the World Economic Forum in 2012 as a Young Global Leader.

Victoria Chick is one of the world’s leading scholars of Keynes and monetary economics. Her book Macroeconomics After Keynes has contributed to the understandings of Keynes’s General Theory. She has also published: The Theory of Monetary Policy; On Money, Method and Keynes: Selected Essays, and written many articles on monetary theory and policy. She taught at UCL for almost 40 years, was Bundesbank Guest-Professor at the Free University of Berlin in 2000-2001 and has held visiting posts at the Reserve Bank of Australia, McGill University and the Universities of Southampton, Aarhus, Louvain, Catania, Burgundy, and California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz. In 1988 alongside Philip Arestis, Victoria founded the Post Keynesian Economics Study Group (PKSG).

Geoff Tily is senior economist at the Trades Union Congress (TUC), responsible for commentary and analysis of the economy and policy advice. He has researched Keynes’s monetary theory and policies for 20 years, and his book Keynes Betrayed (Palgrave, 2010) challenges conventional wisdoms around the association of Keynes with only fiscal policy. For the majority of his career he worked at the UK Office for National Statistics, involved in the production and interpretation of economic statistics. From 2011 to 2014 he was a member of the Treasury’s macroeconomic analysis team, working with the Bank of England and Office for Budgetary Responsibility. A constant theme of his work is the investigation of economic relations using the National Accounts and other economic statistics. 

Jo Michell’s research interests include finance, macroeconomics, money and banking, and income distribution.  He has undertaken consultancy work for UNCTAD, the ILO, and FEPS. He has taken part in two large European Commission-funded research projects, AUGUR and FESSUD. He has published on macroeconomics and finance in peer reviewed journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics and Metroeconomica. He co-edited the Handbook of Critical Issues in Finance with Jan Toporowski. In 2014 he was one of the founders of Reteaching Economics, a group of early-career academics dedicated to pluralism in the teaching of economics.

Nathalie Spencer works in ING’s Group Research department. She develops content for the eZonomics website relating behavioural insight to personal finance, and is working on the Think Forward Initiative to research how to improve financial capability. Additionally, the eZonomics team produces the ING International Surveys published several times per year. Nathalie formerly led the RSA’s Social Brain Behavioural Science work, where she applied a behavioural science perspective to various social issues of our time, including health and inequality in education. She is co-author of the RSA’s 2015 report Wired for Imprudence: the behavioural hurdles to financial capability. 

Ben Fine has (co)authored or edited over thirty books and published over 250 articles covering a wide range of economic theory, economic and social policy, development economics, political economy and the history of economic thought, with a strong intellectual commitment to interdisciplinarity. Different books were awarded the Gunnar Myrdal and Deutscher Prizes in 2009. He has been a member of the Social Science Research Committee of the UK’s Food Standards Agency since its foundation, for which he chaired the Working Group on Reform of Slaughterhouse Controls. He was an expert witness at the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Inquiry, and served as one of four international expert advisors on President Mandela’s 1995/96 South African Labour Market Commission. He was Research Editor at the Industry and Employment Branch of the Greater London Council, and has advised UNDP, UNRISD, UNDESA, UNCTAD and other progressive organisations including trade unions and those within civil society. He is also Chair of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy, IIPPE.

Andy Denis worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit in the 1980s, writing research reports on various sectors of the economy for the EIU journal Retail Business. He joined City University Business School in 1990 as a researcher in financial development, moving to the Economics Department in 1991. He gained his PhD in 2002. His research interests are in the history and philosophy of economics, and he has published on Adam Smith, Keynes, Hayek, Malthus, and the methodology of the Neoclassical and Austrian Schools of Economics. In 2009 he guest-edited a special issue of the International Review of Economics Education on pluralism in the teaching of economics. More recently he co-edited a symposium on “Microfoundations”, published in the Review of Political Economy. Dr Denis teaches a third-year undergraduate course on Financial Economics and a first-year course in Applied Macroeconomics. He teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the History of Economic Thought, and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate projects. He is an active member of City University’s Academic Governance Committee, the Competition and Markets Authority Working Group, and the Programmes and Review Committee. He is treasurer of The History of Economic Thought Society (THETS).

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) holds the Chair in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value, University College London (UCL) where she is establishing a new Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (launching Autumn 2017). Mazzucato’s highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem 2013; Public Affairs, 2015) was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. She is winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy and the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis and in 2013 she was named as one of the '3 most important thinkers about innovation' in the New Republic. Her current research projects include two funded by the EC Horizon 2020 programme:  Innovation-fuelled, Sustainable, Inclusive Growth (ISIGrowth) and Distributed Global Financial Systems for Society (Dolfins) and a new project on Rethinking Medical Innovation by the Open Society Foundations. She is co-editor of a new bookRethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Wiley Blackwell, July 2016), and is currently writing The Value of Everything, which will be published by Penguin’s Allen Lane in 2017.

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). He currently holds a Professorial Fellowship on Prosperity and Sustainability in the Green Economy (PASSAGE) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Tim has written extensively on the complex relationship between economic growth, wellbeing and sustainability. Between 2004 and 2011, he was Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, where his work culminated in the publication of his controversial best-seller ‘Prosperity without Growth – economics for a finite planet’. Since 2010, Tim has been engaged in an ambitious collaborative project to build a new ecological macroeconomics. He and Prof Peter Victor from York University, Canada are developing the conceptual basis for an economy in which stability no longer depends on relentless consumption growth. He is also an award-winning playwright with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.

Ozlem Onaran has done extensive research on issues of inequality, wage-led growth, employment, globalization, gender, and crises. She has directed research projects for the International Labour Organisation, the Vienna Chamber of Labour, the Austrian Science Foundation, and is currently directing projects funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Foundation of European Progressive Studies and Union21. She has more than sixty articles in books and peer reviewed journals such as Cambridge Journal of Economics, World Development, Environment and Planning A, 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.