Peter Neary named as President-Elect of Royal Economic Society

Merton's Professor Peter Neary has been named as President-Elect of the Royal Economic Society, and will serve as President in 2017-18.

Founded in 1890 (though its Royal Charter was not granted until 1902), the Royal Economic Society is the representative body for UK economists. Its publications include the flagship The Economic Journal, one of the leading general journals in economics worldwide, and its annual conference attracts over 700 delegates.

Professor Neary commented:

"This is a huge honour and an enormous responsibility. The Royal Economic Society is a large and complex organisation, with responsibilities to both the profession and the wider public. It plays an important role within the UK but is also international in scope: 55% of our 3,600 members are based outside the UK, as are many of the contributors to our journals and participants at our conferences. I am very humbled that the task of overseeing all this has been given to a relatively recent immigrant.

"We economists are not a popular bunch. We are damned when we disagree (as on the timing of recessions), and damned when we do agree (as on the consequences of Brexit). We need to try harder to get our messages across, emphasising more the simple lessons that we insiders take for granted, while at the same time continuing to facilitate exchanges between professionals on the complex technical controversies at the research frontier. Topical simple messages might include the fact that recessions are harder to predict than horse races or the weather; whereas the qualitative effects of a major policy change, such as losing full access to the largest integrated market in the world, are, sadly, relatively easy to foresee.

"Lovers of Oscar Wilde will recall Miss Prism's advice to her pupil Cecily: 'The chapter on the fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.' For better or worse, economics has never been more exciting, nor more in need of both fundamental research and sensible policy advice. I am looking forward enormously to working with colleagues in the Royal Economic Society to try and put more sense into the sensational."

Peter Neary has been a Professor of Economics at Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Merton, since 2006. An Irish citizen, he took his DPhil in Oxford and then returned to Ireland, where he was Professor of Political Economy at University College Dublin from 1980 to 2006. He works mainly on international trade: his early work is credited with explaining the effects of structural change, such as a major oil discovery, on a nation’s competitiveness, while more recently he has pioneered the study of global firms in the world economy.