New measures of economic success
OECD's top economist Laurence Boone suggests governments must look beyond GDP to stem rising global inequalities
Laurence Boone, Chief Economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), did not grow up wanting to spend her days poring over numbers and percentages. “I always intended to become a doctor,” she says. “But then when I first tried medicine, I realised I didn’t like the sight of blood.
These days, of course, it’s possible to argue that it’s the numbers and percentages that are the really frightening things, and that we currently need economic healers as much as medical ones.
In a world where protectionism, the rise of populist nationalist governments, rising inequality and rapid climate change are all playing an increasingly significant role in our lives, high-flying economists such as Boone, who took her PhD in Economics at London Business School in 1995, suddenly find themselves in the eye of the storm, with the unenviable job not only of diagnosing and making sense of the causes of the chaos, but also of putting forward possible cures. “It is an extremely challenging and interesting time to be an economist,” agrees Boone, with a degree of understatement. “The transformation to a digital economy, the energy transition, the way we trade, the way we work – everything is changing.”
