Podcast: Key Figures – Peter McGregor and Kim Swales

In the third installment of our Key Figures series, Mairi Spowage speaks to Kim Swales and Peter McGregor: two economists who were director of the Fraser of Allander Institute at various times, and instrumental to our longstanding work in CG modelling.

Transcript

00:00:07 Mairi Spowage

Hello and welcome to the latest Fraser of Allander podcast. This podcast is one of a series we’re doing with previous directors of the Institute.

My name is Mairi Spowage, the current director of the Institute, and I’m really pleased to say that today I’m joined by Peter McGregor and Kim Swales, who were both directors of the Institute at various points in its history, but also a huge part of the department and the sort of modelling work that we continue to do in the Fraser to this day.

00:00:43 Mairi Spowage

So thank you both very much for joining me today. It’s really nice that you’ve come together so we can have a conversation and hopefully you can jog each other’s memories about the past. But it’d be good for listeners just to hear a little bit about both of you.

So, Kim, if I can come to you first, could you tell our listeners a little bit about kind of your journey into economics and then how you first came to Strathclyde and interacted with the Fraser of Allander Institute?

00:01:15 Kim Swales

When I got into economics, I would say, completely by accident. Actually, that’s worse than that. At school, I was doing double maths. I had one choice, either physics or economics.

00:01:32 Kim Swales

I was going to do physics, but the teacher who was going to take the physics class, I hadn’t been able, I’d always been very good at physics up to the final year, but the teacher who took it in the final year, I had difficulty understanding him.

00:01:49 Kim Swales

But I was going to take it because I thought economics, well, what is it, you know? Now, in my memory, I’m sitting in a very small classroom because there were only about half a dozen of us doing double maths. And I could see the physics person coming up the corridor to pick up the names of the people who were going to do A-level physics and thinking, no, I can’t do this.

But I only had one option, which was economics. And that’s how I ended up in economics. That’s me. And pretty much everything else came from that because at A level it became very clear that although I was very good at maths, I was having difficulty at the boundaries for the maths. I thought I can’t do a maths degree, so what can I do?

00:02:44 Kim Swales

I wasn’t that good at economics in school, but that was the only option. So that’s why in the, you know, it all pretty much the same from then onwards. So it was completely by accident.

00:02:59 Mairi Spowage

That’s brilliant. And how did you end up at Strathclyde then after studying?

00:03:05 Kim Swales

Well, again, I ended up in Glasgow completely by accident because I got a job. What happened was I was unemployed for some time and I was being harassed by the social security people.

I was applying for jobs, but not very intensively. And what happened was that my supervisor at Cambridge, Ajit Singh, was doing a seminar in Glasgow Uni. What happened was they had a project where they had a research assistant’s job, but they’d taken somebody on, but they’d quit. Well, they hadn’t come, one week before they were supposed to come.

So they had the project, they had the money, it was running, they had no research assistant. And he said, well, they said, do you know anybody? And they said, well, I know this guy’s looking for a job. And so they sent me a letter and said, just come up in the morning.

00:04:13 Kim Swales

I went round the department, which was the Department of Social Economic Research at Glasgow, and I talked to everybody. And then they said, by the way, we’ve just arranged for you to have an interview. They never mentioned an interview, an interview in the afternoon. I had an interview.

00:04:36 Kim Swales

I was a research assistant. It was something like 5 professors there in the old building at Glasgow. And I think they were pretty desperate and they gave me the job. And then afterwards, Lori, what was he called?

00:04:55 Peter McGregor

Hunter.

00:04:56 Kim Swales

Hunter, the person who was my, going to be in charge of it, said, go and see Lori Hunter, he’s head of department. And I came, you’re kind of thinking, well, there’s nothing that you can mess up here. They’ve just given me the job.

00:05:11 Kim Swales

I went in and knocked on the door. It was a big room, right, a big room, opened up. Didn’t see anybody there, nobody there. And then he kind of appeared from underneath the desk.

00:05:23 Kim Swales

I don’t know what had happened there. Anyway, what happened was he said, well, we’re going to give you a job. He said, but we’re not going to let you do any teaching. And I said, well, I thought, well, that’s fair enough. I wasn’t a teacher.

I mean, I hardly knew what the job was anyway, but it wasn’t a teaching job. We’re not going to do any teaching because we think you’ve got personality problems.

That was my introduction to Glasgow, but I love the place and I, that’s how it happened.

00:05:56 Mairi Spowage

You got to Glasgow.

00:05:57 Kim Swales

That’s how I got to Glasgow. Then I went to Glasgow-Caledonian. At that point, Glasgow College of Technology.

00:06:05 Mairi Spowage

That’s what Glasgow Cale was called at that time.

00:06:07 Kim Swales

Yes, Glasgow College of Technology. And then from there in 1978 came to the department.

00:06:15 Mairi Spowage

1978, now, yes, because that’s what one of your former colleagues, Elizabeth, told us, that the ‘78 thing. So she was right about that then?

00:06:25 Kim Swales

Because we came, meet Pishan, it was came from Glasgow colleagues around the same time that they were before me.

00:06:35 Peter McGregor

Seventy-six.

00:06:36 Kim Swales

Yeah.

00:06:38 Mairi Spowage

So, Peter, what about you? What was your journey into economics? We know we know you ended up at Strathclyde in 1976. How did you get there?

00:06:46 Peter McGregor

Well, a good point.

00:06:47 Peter McGregor

I’m struggling to remember how I got into economics, but what happened was I’d applied at university, but frankly didn’t think I was going to get in. But I applied for something at Stone.

00:06:59 Peter McGregor

It was a new degree, and they were saying, oh, this would be great for employment prospects. It was called technological economics, which was some kind of science, I can’t remember which, mathematics and economics.

00:07:13 Peter McGregor

And the honest truth was, I thought, well, I might as well have a good time in first year because I’m unlikely to get through this. This is a terrible answer, obviously not for students.

And I did have quite a good time, but fortunately I really enjoyed the economics and amazingly, did quite well in that, despite not a great deal of effort.

00:07:34 Peter McGregor

And my other subjects, I think I understood the grades to be, we’re passing you, but don’t darken our door again. So that led me on to specialise in economics.

00:07:47 Peter McGregor

Although I did continue with some maths subsequently. But so that’s how really I began to specialise in economics.

And then what happened, at the end of the degree, I got a chance to work part-time and did a post-graduate degree part-time at the then the Institute of Finance and Investment.

00:08:06 Peter McGregor

And on the first day that I was there, was an envelope passed under the door and I opened it and it announced the closure of the Institute.

00:08:14 Mairi Spowage

Where was this Institute?

00:08:18 Peter McGregor

Stirling University. Andrew Bain was the director and he decided he’d lost some senior staff and decided that it wasn’t – However, fortunately, this was a case of correlation without causation, of course. That’s my story anyway.

00:08:33 Peter McGregor

And so it ran on for the two years that I needed to part-time research, a part-time master’s degree. And then when I graduated from that, my wife Elena got a job teaching in Glasgow and, a job came up in Glasgow College of Technology, as it was then, applied for it, got it.

And then I think I was only there a year, I think Elizabeth might have been there two years, I can’t remember. And then a couple of jobs came up at Strathclyde in ‘76.

00:09:06 Peter McGregor

We applied for them, we both got them. So that’s how I came to be at Strathclyde, initially as a lecturer in the economics department.

00:09:15 Mairi Spowage

So you’re coming as a lecturer in the economics department. When you were looking at the job when you first came, I mean, was there a discussion about working with this newly formed institute as part of the department or?

00:09:28 Peter McGregor

Do you know, there wasn’t actually, there wasn’t a discussion about that directly because I had actually been working with Andrew Bean, who had shifted across from Stirling to Strathclyde.

I’d been working with him on monetary economics, which was his specialist subject, and macro more generally. And so, initially, that’s what I came to do.

00:09:48 Peter McGregor

The lectureship was actually in labour economics, so the promise was that I’d learned some labour economics before I taught it. I think I was given a year to prepare.

These were new courses in labour economics, in fact, I think Bob Hart was leading it at that point, if I remember rightly.

00:10:03 Peter McGregor

And so, I had a bit of time to work up the labour economics and so I did quite a bit of that and quite a bit of teaching in that area. So that was the main focus.

00:10:12 Peter McGregor

What happened, the institute connection really, although of course I knew people in the institute, but what happened was I think there was an ESRC project held within the institute and it was modelling the Scottish economy.

And one of the researchers, Frank Harrigan, who I’ll mention again later, he was on a leave of absence to come work on a consultancy in Malaysia, I think, and they were looking for somebody to replace him.

00:10:38 Peter McGregor

And they approached me, I think Ian McNichol, who was he, then the research director rather than direct, he approached me and asked me if I’d be prepared to come on board for, this was a secondment, if you like, from the department, so leave me a bit, a good bit of teaching in order to contribute to the SLC project.

00:10:55 Peter McGregor

And that’s how it, that’s how it began, that’s how I began working in regional economics.

And then, I mean, subsequently what happened was, well, I suppose, I guess what happened was we started working in regional and had an interest in it. We’ll talk about that in a bit, I guess.

And the kind of first major grant application that I was involved in came subsequent to that when Frank Harrigan return from Malaysia and Ian, Frank and myself put in a, an application, a rather speculative one, I think, to the SRC’s Macroeconomic Modeling Consortium.

00:11:34 Peter McGregor

That was the home of things like London Business School, National Institute of Economics, who were forecasting and analysing the UK economy.

Anyway, we actually got the award and that started us off. And then subsequently, a lot of the, we managed to keep securing funding from various sources, not always easily, and sometimes scraping, scraping a bit to get the funds together. Well, you know about that.

00:12:02 Peter McGregor

So, that’s how it, that’s how it began. So, I don’t know if you want me to say something about what kind of ideas –

00:12:10 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, well, it just, again, let’s come to that in a second. So, Kim, you’re joining a couple of years, the economics department, a couple of years after Peter.

Yeah, And what about you? Were you coming for a lectureship as well?

00:12:24 Kim Swales

Yeah, I was coming for a lectureship also. I wasn’t, I wasn’t allocated anything particular, so I wasn’t –

00:12:36 Mairi Spowage

You didn’t have to learn labour economics.

00:12:39 Kim Swales

I was just, you know, a lecturer. So, at that time, whatever courses nobody wanted to do, that’s the course that the person, the last person in the department would get. That’s completely the opposite of what happens now. I think they’re very, you know, they’re eased in.

But that wasn’t the case there. So I got a macro course where I wasn’t particularly macro, but for, I’d actually done it in Glasgow. The project I’d been involved in was a new firm formation.

So it was setting up, it was with John Fern, and it was setting up a data bank, a computer data bank of individual establishments in Glasgow and in West Midlands. And it was looking at employment variations and how they moved between, you know, firms closing, firms opening, things.

00:13:41 Kim Swales

It was, so I was actually moving into a regional, although I know, again, I never chose that because I, it was just this was a project. So, but I did, so I did this macro course. I did some micro courses and, that’s how it went, really.

00:14:02 Kim Swales

I was doing work with Brian, well, Elizabeth, on government office relocation. So we had a project on government office relocation with Frank –

00:14:18 Mairi Spowage

Oh Elizabeth mentioned this actually.

00:14:18 Kim Swales

Frank Steven. And then another one with the Scottish Government.

So we did a couple of things there and we did various academic stuff on Keynesian multipliers and things like this and also various things about cost benefit stuff.

I was working with Peter on bounds of payment-constrained growth, partly because I’d read an article and I thought, well, I don’t really know all that much, although I was doing this, I did this two years macro thing, but, you know, and we actually just worked together. I came and said, look, is this right? And what’s this?

00:15:04 Kim Swales

So, and that built up actually quite a big subsequently interaction with Thirwall and what was his chum called anyway?

00:15:14 Peter McGregor

Macombie.

00:15:16 Kim Swales

Yeah, Macombie. And so that, I mean, so I’d worked with both Elizabeth and Brian, but I wasn’t part of the institute. And I mean, Peter, what happened, I think, is that Ian Jenkins, who was working on the project, the SRC project, that the Macromodelling Consortium decided to leave, Peter later told me he offered the job to somebody else in the department. They turned it down.

00:15:53 Mairi Spowage

Really?

00:15:56 Kim Swales

I understand that you sent it to Donald Holden and he turned it down. So I was like second choice, even then, of coming into the… So it was, anyway, that’s how it happened.

00:16:08 Peter McGregor

How could I have been so scary? I don’t believe it, but actually I was working with Donald on the first – I never remember, I don’t remember. Why did I tell you?

00:16:23 Kim Swales

So that’s how I got into the institute, really. But even when I was in the institute, I was doing a lot of teaching. I was doing honours year teaching for, well, in the micro class, really.

00:16:35 Kim Swales

But I’d always thought that the kind of modelling we were doing was, and also the regional, was a combination of micro and macro, and that’s basically where regional was. So it was ideal, as far as I was concerned, to be working, finally working on something I’d chose, I guess.

00:16:53 Mairi Spowage

You got there in the end.

So, well, let’s talk a little bit about the kind of research that you were doing over the years as you were sort of in the institute formally and the department and then all the things in between. We’ll talk about your various times as director, which I know was a bit, sort of a time when it was being passed around amongst a few people over a period of time.

But what are the main modelling areas you were working on? And I guess, particularly the ones that persist to this day, for our interested, but maybe not all economics listeners.

00:17:37 Peter McGregor

The audience now shrinks dramatically if it hasn’t already, but well, I guess the kind of…

Part of the motivation here was really, I guess, a dissatisfaction with the state of kind of system-wide regional modelling at the time, which typically was based upon kind of very, very kind of demand-driven type systems, including input-output models.

I’m very fond of input-output models as well, but they are predicated upon the assumption of a kind of completely passive supply side that can be adapted in various ways.

00:18:20 Peter McGregor

And so it’s that when you have an increase in demand, you automatically get an increase in output without any increase in costs. Now, this seems unreasonable kind of set of assumptions to make if you’re talking about, excuse me, an economy with big excess capacity.

You know, we’ve got large unemployment, big excess capacity, rather less applicable to recent experience, even then, recent experience, and where, there was evidence of supply constraints and importantly, some very important supply shocks.

00:18:51 Peter McGregor

And strictly speaking, I know people have worked very hard to try and adapt it, but strictly speaking, these systems that apply a similar effect of their passive supply, so just cannot cope with either of those things properly, in our judgment anyway.

And so we thought, well, what we ought to try and do is try and capture some of that in modelling that is still multi-sectoral, so keeps the input-output, but it extends it to incorporate the supply side of the economy.

And that kind of underlies, I hope Kim is not about to jump in and disagree completely, that kind of underlies all that happened subsequently.

00:19:33 Peter McGregor

And in terms of kind of areas, I mean, one area is just, I suppose, we just call it regional economic analysis, lots of applied economic analysis. It’s a whole range of different topics.

And a second, and although it was a later development, was the extension of these models to incorporate energy inputs and environmental impacts in terms of CO2 emissions typically, so that you’re extending the scope of the analysis to be able to look at this.

00:20:10 Peter McGregor

Now, of course, those extensions, I mean, there are examples of extensions using input-output to do precisely that before we did it in this context. So I’m not saying this is the first, but this was an important development for us. That’s where the energy is still a bit, I think.

00:20:25 Kim Swales

I mean, one of the things I think was important, wasn’t it, was that Frank had experience of development plan, development modelling. And in development modelling, then a CGE approach was becoming operative, but hadn’t been in a regional approach.

So it was a very, but even in development, it was kind of innovative. And it was, people didn’t have the computing power that they have now. Sometimes people didn’t even have a computer on which to do the model when they first –

Well, can I tell the story? Or you tell the story?

00:21:12 Peter McGregor

No, you tell the story.

00:21:14 Kim Swales

Well, when they first got the grant, I think one of, one thing must be said, didn’t it? I mean, I don’t think it was appreciated, what that grant meant in the department merely overall, how important.

00:21:29 Peter McGregor

Yeah.

00:21:30 Kim Swales

You know?

00:21:32 Mairi Spowage

This is the SRC grant.

00:21:34 Kim Swales

Yeah, I mean, the difficulty of getting that grant and the innovative thing.

00:21:39 Kim Swales

And of course, with Frank, well, when I say, of course, it was to be on a laptop computer, but we didn’t have a laptop. So that was like the first job convincing the department you actually needed this thing to run this project.

00:22:01 Peter McGregor

Yeah, we were going to build a computable general equilibrium model without anything to compute it on. So that was a bit of a challenge for the technology.

00:22:10 Mairi Spowage

Did you get the computer?

00:22:12 Peter McGregor

Oh, yes, we did that. Otherwise, otherwise things might have come to a grind and halt rather rapidly. Yeah, and Kim’s quite right, Frank, so Frank’s experience was really by the end.

00:22:24 Mairi Spowage

What year was this, the grant?

00:22:26 Peter McGregor

That we got this? That was 1980, I want to say ‘87, I’m thinking it was a four-year deal.

00:22:32 Mairi Spowage

Right. Oh, that’s good.

00:22:33 Peter McGregor

Yeah. Oh, no, it was a great deal. Yeah.

00:22:34 Mairi Spowage

And to what extent was the development that happened earlier in the Fraser’s life, all of the input-output tables and, you know, all of that’s kicked off. We discussed with David, you know, the sort of habit that put into the Scottish economic system of producing these, which continues to this day with the Scottish government publishing them every year.

I’m not sure we’d quite be where we are now with IO in Scotland if it hadn’t been for what happened in 1975 to ‘80. But to what extent is that foundation important for what you’re trying to build on top of it, I suppose.

00:23:08 Peter McGregor

Absolutely fundamental is the answer. I mean, we couldn’t have done any of it without the pre-existence of the input-output tables and other data that were generated alongside it. So absolutely critical.

So it seemed as if we were being slightly critical of input-output analysis or modelling, but in fact, the input-output database is shared with this, indeed, in our heads, input-output models are computable general equilibrium models just with particular sets of assumptions.

So that was absolutely fundamental. So there’s no question of that.

So the fact that the founding directors were focused on that and were responsible with others, together with others, for constructing them, the first set of input accounts, and the Scottish government had the perspicacity to continue with that process, I mean, that’s absolutely fundamental for what we’re doing.

We wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without that.

00:24:06 Mairi Spowage

No, absolutely. And you see the route through that some of the countries are trying to follow now, Wales just published an IO table for the first time in many years, this year, but it’s not just that it builds the foundation for you to build the sort of models you’re talking about, it’s also builds, it allows us to have much more regular things like quarterly national accounts. It gives you the structure which then forms the basis for other sorts of models. So it’s the start of so much people talk about that, but you need it.

00:24:40 Peter McGregor

Exactly. It’s fundamental. Absolutely fundamental.

00:24:43 Mairi Spowage

So what was the kind of outcome of that for your project? You know, what’s your memory of that research and where it went and did it go where you were expecting?

00:24:51 Peter McGregor

Well, I don’t know if it went where we were expecting. I do remember having to go to the first meeting at the macro modelling consortium, which was, rather a big deal for us as last from Glasgow.

So it was, I think it was either London or Warwick, because Warwick had the macro modelling bureau, didn’t they? They encompassed the whole model.

00:25:12 Peter McGregor

And we were on it – And you know, the great thing was to go down there with an operational computable general equilibrium model.

Well, that was our aspiration. But in the first year, we didn’t quite get there. When I say we, Frank didn’t quite get it to run properly. So that sounded as if he was responsible for it not running, he would have been responsible for it running when he did.

But so we went down and we didn’t have the, but we talked about the, you know, the approach and what the plans were.

And I guess it was used in those days and we got, and Kim was involved, I’m sure, before the end of that, long before the end of that. So we used it to do a number of kind of fairly standard things that you might do with an input-output table, but with this, so that you could say, you could identify what difference a non-passive supply side made, and what different assumptions you might make about that if you don’t have the evidence, and what impact that has.

00:26:11 Peter McGregor

So understanding how the system operates. But also, so one thing we did, I think, was definitely we looked at the impact of a regional labour subsidy, which was one of the, you’re too young to remember this, Mairi, but, you know, the UK government used to actually introduce regional factor subsidies. And so we used the model to look at that.

So the regional employment premium was one, I remember, because it was quite early on, wasn’t it, and examine the things that determine the outcome from that.

00:26:42 Kim Swales

So, I mean, I think one thing that should be emphasized with the difficulty involved with such modelling to begin with, there were not these computer packages that we have now, so that people were programming from, I mean, Frank was programming, he was doing all the programming initially, wasn’t he? And he was programming in C.

00:27:10 Kim Swales

I remember Peter even attempting completely wiping, completely wiping.

00:27:17 Peter McGregor

I know how to crash a hard disk if anybody’s interested, but C unfortunately is a very tolerant language.

00:27:24 Kim Swales

It was very, you know, and you’re solving many, many equations simultaneously. And it took us months to get the model even to solve for one period, to get it to solve for one period.

And I think when we started to get it to solve, even at the beginning, it was like you were trying to contort the theory to get the results, you know, were not correct. You know, there were lots of problems even to get the model to solve.

And even when we got it to solve, you solved for one period, a feature of three sectors, a three-sector, one-period model.

It took about six or seven minutes, didn’t it, for the to get one solution, just one solution. You could go out and have a cup of tea before, you know.

00:28:21 Kim Swales

So it was quite a feat even to get the thing operational to begin with. I think a second thing was you were attempting to introduce into a CGE model labour market options, which typically weren’t available when people did this for development economics and the like.

And I was amazed, actually. I went to, well, international CGE modeling. This was early 1990s. And we thought we were minnows really in this, all these big names who were doing this and doing that. And you were treated like a bill innovator, it was like, it was really amazing. It was like people were wanting to listen, how do you do this, how do you do this?

So it was like innovation, right from the start, but it was extremely difficult modelling to begin with, without.

00:29:28 Peter McGregor

I remember one one one thing of it. Many of the CGE models at the time had kind of fixed labor supply. And the point about this was they do things like look at the impact of NAFTA. And one of the conclusions would be it doesn’t have any effect on employment.

Well, of course, you’ve assumed it won’t have any effect on employment before you started. So the conclusion is not exciting.

So yeah, so there was quite a lot of naivety about modelling labour markets in the early days, and we were trying, I guess, to overcome that.

00:30:00 Mairi Spowage

So, what are your memories then? So we’ve sort of got to the early ‘90s, I suppose, the four-year grant and the development of these models for Scotland. What sort of, where did the research go after that?

You mentioned, you had managed to get some sort of funding by hook or by crook.

00:30:16 Peter McGregor

Yes.

00:30:16 Mairi Spowage

But presumably that sometimes would take the research in a particular direction.

00:30:20 Peter McGregor

It did, it did, but in fact, one of the attractions of this kind of framework is precisely its flexibility. You know that with the IO, but even more flexibility with this kind of model.

00:30:32 Peter McGregor

So, so, in fact, in principle, since it does encompass the entire economy and does specify all the sectors, admittedly, at whatever level, but you can choose the level of aggregation, so you can change the structure of the model to suit the question in hand.

So, and all the applications, in a sense, are a kind of illustration of that.

So, I mean, for example, inward investment, and so we did at one point, I think, with Gary Gillespie’s actively, active involvement, develop an ownership disaggregated input-output system and then CGE, so that you could treat the form-known sector separately and look at the impact of it on various things.

Similarly, with higher education institutions, we began by disaggregating the input-output table to reflect the individual higher education institutions in the UK.

00:31:25 Peter McGregor

And then you could look at that systematically and then put it in the IO. So, and then the energy, economy, environment, you could extend to include energy inputs and environmental impacts.

So, there were lots of possibilities and I’m afraid we exploited them wherever we could, wherever we could find suitable funding.

And we were very fortunate in that respect because we managed to secure funding on a wide range – I mean, there were times when it was difficult, but we managed to secure a lot of funding over the years from the research councils and EPSRC once we started doing it.

00:31:59 Mairi Spowage

That’s energy, yeah.

00:32:01 Kim Swales

I mean, we did get some funding also from work, we did work for Scottish Development Agency.

00:32:08 Peter McGregor

Yes.

00:32:10 Kim Swales

The work where we’re disaggregating the electronic sector by ownership, which was funded by them. And also we did some work where we looked at, I mean, this was really interesting, where we looked at the impact, the micro-impact of particular policies, and then said, well, how do we replicate that micro-impact, which Scottish development agency has got from some consultancy?

Then how do you replicate that in the model?

And then when you replicate that in the model, what are the further macro developments?

00:32:53 Kim Swales

They were also interested in the impact on the rest of the UK. I think that’s the first time we had a Scottish rest of the UK model. And I mean, that was really, really interesting with David Lehman. I did that with David Lehman.

So we did have some interaction with Scottish Development around that time as well.

00:33:23 Mairi Spowage

So that’s the sort of applications. And I suppose, were you also able to spend time making the model more sophisticated, bringing it on, like you said, adding in the Scotland, rest of the UK, what are your memories of being able to kind of develop it and make it, more sophisticated?

I guess its computing power got better as well.

00:33:44 Peter McGregor

Yes, computing power got better.

One thing that comes to mind for me of, I think, for Scottish Enterprise, didn’t we develop a growth version of the model?

We did, I’m sure we did, develop a version that was explicitly a growth model rather than, you know, levels of output. Although we didn’t pursue that much since it didn’t reveal very much that it’s been particularly interesting at the time.

And we made various extensions through years. Kim’s mentioned one big one, the interregional one, so that you’re looking at more than one region.

Of course, I know the work within the CITP and that was too early and whatever, you’re taking that much further, so many regions, not just two regions.

00:34:27 Peter McGregor

And that’s really one of the ways to go, and it’s really, really interesting and challenging. So that was very important.

That was one development. I think another kind of technical development was the introduction of perfect foresight models.

I mean, some of them macro models had not just macro theory, had emphasised the importance of rational expectations, the fact that the traditional macro models were faulty and not taking account of the fact that people continue to behave in a particular way, irrespective of what actually happened.

00:35:00 Peter McGregor

So people then form a view of the future that influences the current behaviour and incorporating that into the CG was a bit of a challenge as well.

I think that was Patricio that was at the forefront of that. Is that not right? So, for example, so investment is a classic example.

We have forward expectations, forward-looking expectations are maybe critical in determining current behaviour. And similarly, consumption as well, you know, the consumers may adapt their consumption spending around. And so that was another development.

00:35:35 Peter McGregor

And that allowed us even sometimes just to do sensitivity to say, look, these are the results with a conventional view of investment. And look, what difference does it make if you have forward-looking behaviour? And typically, the answer was largely in terms of the adjustment mechanism.

And I should have said, and that implies another extension that we had prior to that, which was introducing time in the first place. So Kim mentioned that in the first instance, we were just getting single period. We then made the model dynamic by incorporating particularly migration flows, which have changed the population and, sorry, investment.

And the early model just took account of the demand effects of investment. But then we took account of the capacity-building effects of investment and tracked the effects of any shock through time.

So the multi-period extension was important. The forward-looking extension was important. The inter-regional extension was important. And –

And then, well, is that, I mean, there was some we didn’t do much on this, but I remember it was really there was the idea of a behavioural, a behavioural version of the model, taking account of some of the developments on, behavioural economics in the way that transactors actually behave as opposed to the way that economic theories traditionally assume they would behave. And so that was quite interesting as well.

And so – was there any other?

00:37:06 Kim Swales

I mean, I think on that, there were two bits of, one bit where we looked at just a temporary shock.

And when you look at a temporary shock, it makes a big, big difference where they have forward-looking expectations as against not. So that was one.

And the other thing on the behavioural one, again, we were making assumptions about how people took investment decisions, as against simply updating or simply or forward-looking. So it was alternative ways of looking at investment decisions.

So that, I mean, one thing was skill disaggregation. We did some skill disaggregation where we disaggregated by skilled and unskilled. So there’s some labour market.

And also I think kind of endogenous public sector expenditure. So linking public expenditure to taxation or population or to some –

00:38:07 Peter McGregor

That’s a really important one, because that was a theme that continued, not always funded, but periodically funded.

Basically, the successive Scotland Acts imply that Scotland actually became, well, on some people’s judgment anyway, one of the most powerful of all governments in Europe, in terms of, you know, that its control of taxes and expending the amount of taxation and expenditure that it controlled.

And so that opens up a whole set of policies that could now be pursued or could subsequently be pursued, that couldn’t be pursued before.

And that required, however, developing the treatment of taxation and expenditure within the model in more detail than we had it before. And in particular, allowing, well, allowing the introduction of public sector constraints on budgets and that, as Kim says, making public expenditure endogenous within the model under certain circumstances.

00:39:05 Peter McGregor

And so that was an important, really important development since that allowed us to look at things like, you know, this idea, we at one point looked at Scandinavian, a Scandinavian model for Scotland, high tax, high expenditure, a bit of levelling up stuff, and we did – So there were a range over the years, a range of…

00:39:32 Mairi Spowage

And were some of those was those post-devolution then? Or, and because I mean I know from working with you when I joined Strathclyde, you’re still, you’re doing things on the way you can use these new taxpayers, particularly in the post referendum for Smithy as well, but I suppose this would have had to develop over the year.

00:39:53 Peter McGregor

Yes, it did, but I, but yes, and but the other attraction of this system is that you can do lots of experimental if you like stuff.

So saying if they had this power, what could they do with it? You see what I mean?

So you had the flexibility of saying prior to the, so during the debate of will we have devolved tax or not, we were able to say, well, if you had devolved tax, will be.

So you didn’t need the actual powers to be, we never let reality stand in the way of a decent project! So – I’m so, but it was important to try and inform –

00:40:31 Peter McGregor

Well, what we thought we were trying to do was just inform ourselves and maybe others that were interested, on what the challenges were in using these powers to attempt to achieve government change.

00:40:42 Mairi Spowage

So, over all these years and then sort of in the ‘90s and early 2000s, as you’re developing these models and then responding to these external events I suppose to ensure that it can it could be in service of those questions, were you would you have considered yourselves in the institute, in the department, or was there, was it sort of a foot in both, working sometimes with, you’re still teaching, because we’re still in the department as the institute.

We absolutely are, although because of the size of the institute now, there’s a bit more delineation, I suppose, whether you’re a sort of knowledge exchange member of staff or you’re a more traditional academic.

So how did it feel then, and how big was the institute over that kind of period of the ‘90s and the early 2000s?

00:41:29 Kim Swales

Good point. I mean, we always thought of ourselves as being in the institute.

I mean, the thing was, although it was very loose in many respects and quite porous because people did move in and out and people did – I mean, we had, if anything had happened, we would go back into the department.

But other people wouldn’t, you know, I mean, there was people on temporary – so there were a lot of temporary people who came in and later went on – it’s like being kind of manager of a fourth division football club.

I mean, you would get people in who would move, would move up, and it was obviously in their interest to do that. I mean, Gary Gillespie worked for example, I mean, things like this.

00:42:21 Kim Swales

Things like this. But yeah, we would, we got, it was always the case we had our space. And we had quite a lot of space in actual fact, so that we had one floor, but the…

00:42:37 Peter McGregor

It felt very much like a team, yes.

00:42:41 Kim Swales

But so, but the members would change, but the admin, but I would think we should say, Isabel helped the department, held the space completely together.

She was always very welcoming when people came and was concerned when they left.

00:42:59 Mairi Spowage

And was Isabel there when you started?

00:43:04 Peter McGregor

Yes, I think she was, but she was, there was another post she was, kind of secretary, if you like, and but then became the, if you like, the key administrator, and not just key administrator, key social person in the institute.

And if I get, it was a very much a feeling, a team feeling within the institute. And not to say that it’s not nice in a way the department, it’s very pleasant, but it was a particular kind of very friendly kind of atmosphere, very, I mean, it was very enjoyable, to be honest.

And I guess, mainly, I guess, because of the staff, the colleagues, present company included, of course, but also, researchers and PhD students, and many of the PhD students became researchers before going on to greater things.

And so, it was very pleasant and like Kim, I always, I mean, I feel I’ve had a, 40 plus years, probably think that’s far too long, about 40 plus years’ association with the Fraser, because I still feel associated with it, because I still have a wee bit of research input.

00:44:18 Peter McGregor

And, it’s been great fun, but I felt like even when, so I wasn’t always in the institute for, I had a number of spells as head of the Department of Economics, but all, nearly all of my research activity was all joining the Fraser.

So I used to have, when I was doing research, it was meetings with Fraser people mainly.

And so, I mean, that’s how it was. And it was like, socially, it’s very good.

00:44:46 Mairi Spowage

And so, what sort of size then? Half a dozen people, not including PhD students, or am I getting the size just about right, do you think?

00:44:55 Kim Swales

I think 9 or 10.

00:44:58 Peter McGregor

I would say 9 or 10-ish. And if you count all across all activities. I think the modelling group, I’m afraid, diminished to three on occasion, including, Kim, the two of, the two of us around the table.

So, but on other cases, it was it was much bigger, particularly when we got into the energy economy environmental stuff as well. We often have, you know, awards that were on the applied regional economic analysis without any energy or environment in it.

And then we’d have others that were focusing on, for example, the impact of renewable technologies, carbon tax, whatever. So, and so when we have that, the team, even the modeling team grew too, I don’t know. Yeah, at least, let’s say 6, maybe.

00:45:49 Kim Swales

But there would be, you know, Elizabeth and Ken, Ken did the forecasting, and also Cliff and Elma would do their surveys. There were various other people at times would be associated with the individual in there.

So it was always, you know, there was always a, well, Stuart was – It evolved for a long time.

00:46:20 Peter McGregor

And kind of the market?

00:46:22 Kim Swales

Yeah, the consulting side. So there were a number of groups of people who were associated. And at the same time, we had PhD students who typically were in the institute.

I think this was very, very important for us, for people operating with the model, particularly programmers that – because both Patricio, Gioele, came through the PhDs. They weren’t programmers to begin with, so they were learning the programming.

This was much more important when you didn’t have, when you didn’t have packages and things like this. So I mean, having Patricio, I remember – I remember meeting with the Scottish Government when we were suggesting, or they were wanting to know if they subsequently adopted part of the model or being in the model. Being in a room with a number of people there with Patricio on the computer and then saying, well, what would you want to do? What kind of things would you want to do?

And they say, well, let’s put a demand shock or something like this. And him doing it and then the thing coming up on the screen. That was a wonderful meeting to be able to show that you could actually do that, because quite often for something would not blaming anybody else, but it would be extremely difficult to get the model to work on demand, kind of thing.

00:48:02 Peter McGregor

But we should maybe say just about the link with the department that we also very much felt members of the department. I mean, we were both head of department for some time. So those links were very important.

00:48:13 Kim Swales

And people moved the other way.

00:48:15 Peter McGregor

People moved the other way.

00:48:16 Kim Swales

They started off in the Fraser and then moved into the department, but we changed the links with them.

00:48:22 Peter McGregor

Yes, exactly. So there’s a very, we felt, a very high kind of degree of integration between the institute and the wider department. Of course, yeah.

00:48:37 Mairi Spowage

Yeah. And what you were saying about the Scottish Government is really interesting because obviously that work with the Scottish Government forms the basis of the model that they use for any CGE analysis that the Scottish Government use.

Gioele, you mentioned, has worked with Northern Ireland government now to do the same thing for them. So these things have a lot, they do have a very long legacy and they are still being used and developed and so on.

00:49:04 Mairi Spowage

In the early days, quite a lot of support for the Scottish Government team who were doing that, even when they had their own model, supporting them to do it and use it properly and understand the output, which can be the challenge with that sort of modelling, understanding how to design the shock and also understanding how to interpret the output. It’s not just turning the handle on these things.

00:49:24 Kim Swales

Well, I was actually seconded to the Scottish Government. Well, kind of seconded. It wasn’t really seconded -I forced myself in. But they were very good. I mean, they were very good with it.

00:49:39 Peter McGregor

Yeah, absolutely.

00:49:42 Mairi Spowage

But yes, so these things, are still being used and have that have the full legacy. So you talked about sometimes you were head of department for bits and spells.

And I mean, within the academic world, that can sometimes be, who has to do this job next, rather than who’s really keen to be the head of department.

But the directorship of the Fraser between sort of maybe around 2000 and, the mid-2010s, you both were director for a spell. And did that, in those days, really sort of change what you were doing or was it just that, someone had to have the… sort of moniker as a director, so it was, your turn next?

00:50:25 Peter McGregor

I think to be honest, it was partly the latter, in that you, I think you probably had to have at the time the professorial label to represent or be regarded as to represent the institute in the wider university and the department. It was helpful anyway, regarded as helpful at that.

It was so in a sense that partially decided who might and might not be and also who had experience in the activities of the institute. And that really kind of at that time, now I’m not doing any of a disservice here, but I think it was kind of Elizabeth, Kim and myself.

And so, you know, you felt, we both approached it very enthusiastically, I recall, both head of department and director jobs. I think the answer, the honest answer is it didn’t affect me – maybe the same is true of Kim – that much, being director as opposed to, being research directory, which I was for a while.

Because, all the research activity was still going on. So that was still a key part, a major part of what was doing.

Of course, you had to then represent the institute as a whole in various contexts. And that, of course, takes some time, as you know only too well. And that, can be, possibly rather more public presentations than you might otherwise have done, and of a different type as well.

And of course, if you like, a slightly greater responsibility for feeling about the people in other groups, just the narrow modeling group. But to be honest, I mean, there was really a… I’d have to say, quasi-autonomous. I’m just very fortunate with the people who were doing it.

So, for example, the people doing the survey would take care of this. Occasionally, the director would be called into a meeting or whatever, but by and large – similarly the forecasting service, you know, by and large, it was quasi-autonomous and people themselves, similarly the consultants, although we did bits and pieces, of course, of consulting – and, of course, occasional contributions to the commentary, nothing like the others.

00:52:45 Mairi Spowage

Did you experience the same thing, Kim?

00:52:47 Kim Swales

Yeah, I mean, I think the only other thing would be basically you were responsible for the finance, you know, if there were issues about, you know, people’s salaries still being –

00:53:04 Peter McGregor

That could be painful. That could be painful. But that could be painful even within the modelling group.

But it certainly, there were more opportunities for difficulties, of course, the more people you were responsible for in principle. And so, yeah, that could be challenging.

I was delighted to hear from you that it’s less of a challenge right now anyway. But we had periods where it was difficult, periods where it was a lot easier.

00:53:28 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, I mean, we are in demand, which is great, it’s terrific.

00:53:31 Peter McGregor

Terrific.

00:53:33 Mairi Spowage

I like to help as well. I have difficulty saying no to people, but you have to so that we have the right amount of work for the resources that we have.

But it can be challenging. But it’s great to be in demand. But we always need to think about this. We want to do the work that generates most value for public debates and that it’s making a difference essentially.

00:53:58 Peter McGregor

Impact, which is important, isn’t it?

00:54:02 Mairi Spowage

So important.

So just thinking then about, obviously you’ve both retired now, that’s not a –  And you think about the legacy of the tools you’ve built and they’ve been taken on by others. And I’m not going to say they have a life of their own because they need to be maintained.

And you know, we’re, you know, building the next generation of people who will do the next set of modifications to these sorts of models so that they’re still relevant.

I mean, what can you see as kind of the areas that an institute like the FAI could apply these models to in the future?

We’re doing a lot on trade at the moment, and it is obviously both very topical and very academically interesting.

00:54:48 Peter McGregor

Absolutely.

00:54:49 Mairi Spowage

But what do you think are other areas that we could be doing modelling on, using these tools in the future?

00:54:54 Peter McGregor

Well, I mean, I think you mentioned trade, but I don’t think that’s like, just now. I think trade is going to be a biggie for a long time.

I mean, we did something, we did with Gioele and Graeme, maybe somebody else, on Brexit, trying to analyse the consequences.

00:55:14 Mairi Spowage

Graeme talked about this to me, yeah, because that was just after he came.

00:55:18 Peter McGregor

Yes, that’s right, that’s right.

00:55:22 Kim Swales

Yeah, and –

00:55:24 Peter McGregor

Was she involved in that?

00:55:25 Kim Swales

Yeah she was.

00:55:25 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, so that modelling about what different forms of Brexit might mean for Scotland.

00:55:31 Peter McGregor

Yes.

00:55:32 Mairi Spowage

I mean, that still gets used. You know, people still bring that up, you know, that, you know, that this happened, that analysis was done at that time and suggested X and Y. I mean, people still refer to that, you know, it was really impactful, that bit of modelling, yeah.

00:55:46 Peter McGregor

We’d hopefully still refer to stuff we did about 40 years ago, but that’s another matter, but yeah, trade, because I mean, you think about it, trade was absolutely fundamental to a number of constitutional issues. I mean, Brexit being one, secession, independence being another.

00:56:04 Mairi Spowage

Of course.

00:56:05 Peter McGregor

And also, and not that I’m suggesting that all that matters when you’re analysing independence is to look at the model and see what it says about the impact on trade flows. But that’s certainly a key component of it.

And you would want to look at it, indeed, we have with the same group of people. We looked at that comparatively recently, and that was quite interesting as well.

So I think the trade thing is going to go on forever, but I think technological change, efficiency has got to be a big one. And again – well, to be honest, in some form or another, we’ve been looking at that kind of thing, efficiency changes, for almost as long as we’ve had the model going, but perhaps more focused.

And so, for example, energy efficiency, we did a lot of work on that with –  and yes, so we did, I’m trying, yes, we did, we did a lot, or more recently, we attempted to with, to do some energy economy stuff, looking at, radical technical change of the type that we may be going about to go through with AI.

00:57:16 Peter McGregor

And so that’s something we have, no, I’m not, can it answer all the questions, no, but it can draw your attention to what matters in terms of, you know, is it good for employment? Is it disasters for employment?

Well, you know what factors are going to govern that outcome by looking at it in the modeling context, at least, and you can adapt.

And I think that’s back to this point about the flexibility of the framework, hopefully, is able to be redirected and modified appropriately, regardless of what issue comes up. Now, that sounds like magic, and obviously it’s not. And obviously, some things are easier to tackle with this than others. And some things you just wouldn’t have.

I mean, you’re talking about small-scale stuff, you just would never address that with this. But, I think one thing that recently, the phrase that’s been developed, which is quite interesting, I think this interesting poverty, about child poverty and about, we did this thing on the universal basic income.

And those kind of issues, I think, are really important. And if they are big changes in welfare, they do have system-wide consequences, as well as consequences for households. And that’s where I thought what they did was really quite interesting.

They used, back to Kim’s point, microsimulation and then separately the macro simulation.

00:58:43 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, that’s a really interesting project, to try and bring them together. So you think about something like universal basic income, the impacts it could have on individual households. But importantly, you think about what might be the wider economy consequences of something that’s so big and so fiscally consequential that we do need to think about those things as well as what difference it makes for the individual.

And that, pairing the micro with the macro was quite powerful, I thought, in understanding more about the impact something like that could have.

00:59:14 Peter McGregor

No, I think it is.

00:59:16 Mairi Spowage

Ken, what about you? Is there anything else that we could be applying these models more in the future?

00:59:20 Kim Swales

I always thought, I think very early on really, was a big issue was the inter-regional modeling. That’s one thing. And in particular, one problem that we have, well, I think we have is, you know, that how do you, first of all, I mean, how do you parameterize the initial situation?

You have an initial situation where the model is suggesting that things should equalise, but you have an initial situation when things aren’t equal, that there are big differences in prices, in wages, across regions.

Now, you know, how would you set the model up so as to replicate that to begin with? What do you do about London? What do you do about the South East? What do you do about migration?

I mean, I think all of these things, because I always thought basically that regional policy is a UK-wide policy and that it should have UK-wide implications. And there’s a specialization between different regions in certain things. And the idea that somehow you could just get individual cities and somehow they would all increase their productivity to the level of London seemed a weird thing, and that’s been, seems to be like government policy since the Labour Party, since the Labour Party in 1997.

01:00:58 Kim Swales

And that seemed to be completely wrong to me and actually a multi-regional model is appropriate and also one that in some sense accommodates the degree of devolution that applies to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, if you include Northern Ireland in.

I would say that’s the main major issue.

And the way the labour market operates across these different regions as well as within individual regions. It seems to me these are questions that we haven’t really answered. They’re really central.

01:01:42 Mairi Spowage

No, absolutely. They’ve never been more relevant. There’s a new industrial strategy the UK government has produced, it’s a lot of it’s about place-based stuff. You know? It really is.

Although, you know, as you say, these are fundamentally different economies that specialize in different things, but do impact on each other. And I think your point is really well made. And I think there’s never been a better time to have that, to really address it because you’re absolutely right. We don’t really understand how, different policies for different sectors can really impact on different regions and link in with each other.

01:02:13 Peter McGregor

Can I just make a point here that’s right in your area, but one of the problems and one of the things that held up the development of the inter-regional modelling was the quality of the data relating to inter-regional trade. So that’s an area.

01:02:27 Mairi Spowage

Absolutely. And the clusters are interesting. There’s several papers of, that are published through the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence.

And actually, that research, which was about particularly my, but not just my, interest in economic measurement and the challenges with economic statistics of various kinds, particularly regional statistics, but with the fact, I mean, if we could improve it, it would improve the modeling.

So it’s about linking again, those things together, those data inputs, that foundation to make the modeling better and more sensible.

But I mean, all of that research did lead to the ONS developing new measures and new data for interregional trade. You know, it’s taking a long time. All of these things do, and they often are slow burns.

But you know, we are moving forward on this, but there are all sorts of issues with concepts, where does the trade come from?

01:03:19 Peter McGregor

No, absolutely. It’s not straightforward at all, but it’s critical.

01:03:23 Mairi Spowage

But it is moving forward, not as fast as I would like, but it is, and a lot of that, that’s from research that we started 10 years ago, and these things, these things do move forward, but slowly, but you’re absolutely right, it’s critical.

You know, if you don’t have the data to underline the model, you know, to what extent your, the things that come out of it are completely dependent on what you’re assuming about that poorly measured data is very problematic.

So it’s definitely something that we need to continue, investing in economic data.

01:03:57 Kim Swales

I think a related issue is other income flows between regions and also the modelling within the model itself, the modelling of income flows.

I mean, quite often these are treated as somehow as being linear, where in fact they might well not be. And also kind of marginal changes may have quite different implications of flows between agents, you know. I mean, I think that’s an area.

You see, I think the problem, one problem is, of course, this doesn’t come into IO. This is why, so although there’s very sophisticated IO tables, for example, you can’t link household income to income within the IO.

Now, if you can’t do that, well, that’s a major problem. You’ve got to assume, well, you have a SAM and you do it by that. But often that data is not too good.

01:05:00 Kim Swales

And also when you’re assuming it’s linear, which again, often that was the case, this might be kind of a good assumption in the long run for industries, but is it a good assumption for some of these other flows? And that’s an area, I think, which could well be…

01:05:25 Peter McGregor

So I think it links into this, the interesting distributional issues, both within regions and across regions.

01:05:32 Kim Swales

Across regions, that’s right.

01:05:34 Mairi Spowage

Where is the surplus really generated? Where does it end up? Flows of funds… Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It’s much more challenging to measure and capture.

01:05:42 Peter McGregor

Indeed.

01:05:42 Kim Swales

Thinking about it, another issue which we had tried to do something about way back is housing, because obviously this is a massive problem, but it’s one that’s not easily dealt with in CGE.

But, and I think that’s one area, and linked with us thinking about it is other forms of like social capital or infrastructural capital. How do you – ?

Because we did have a go at this, but we’ve never really had enough funds, I think, or to be able to really go through how you deal with infrastructure, how changes in infrastructure affect production, and how you incorporate that into the model.

01:06:38 Mairi Spowage

It’s really interesting because it’s quite critical for, for example, that we really understand the impacts of different sorts of policies on investors in just particular parts of the country, for example. So it’s a really good point.

Like a lot of assumptions are made about how it’s going to, you know, reduce travel time, increase productivity, all of these things. But there’s definitely, it’s an area that needs more work.

01:07:02 Peter McGregor

We had them, remember we actually did something on housing, but… But I mean, it was very broad brush, very, very crude. I think Kevin was involved with what you were saying.

01:07:12 Mairi Spowage

That’s right, it was Shelter, wasn’t it.

01:07:14 Peter McGregor

And there was some, an attempt to say, look, there are supply side things. What would happen if, but very, very basic, it would be good to do that probably.

01:07:24 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, definitely. And you know, in all the research we’re doing with any economic development leads or any regions of Scotland, just now, any cities in Scotland, just now it’s housing, it’s the housing. It’s the first issue we’re talking about, which it wasn’t 10 years ago.

It’s always important, but now it’s like the thing that’s really glaring and a problem for local areas.

So, well, listen, you’ve given a lot to think about our future modelling developments as well, but I just want to thank you so much for your time. It’s been a really interesting discussion. Really good to hear your thoughts.

01:07:55 Mairi Spowage

But I guess just to say that the legacy of these things that have been built over all of these years in the FAI, really continue to inform policy making, they continue to inform the work that the institute does and I think it always will. So thank you so much for your time today guys. It’s been really interesting. Good to hear some of your stories. Quite fun.

So if you want to hear the rest of our podcasts with previous directors. They’ll be available on our website.

And don’t forget to sign up to our 50th anniversary conference if you would like to come. It’s on the 18th and 19th of September. Spaces are getting quite limited, so if you haven’t signed up already, please do.

And we’ll see you again next time for the next Fraser of Allander podcast. Thanks.

01:08:45 Ben Cooper

Hello, 2025 marks a significant year for the Fraser of Allander Institute. Founded in 1975, the Institute celebrates 50 years of leading economic research in Scotland. Given this, we have a series of exciting events and content planned for the remainder of this year to mark this milestone.

This includes our anniversary conference on the 18th and 19th of September this year at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre. We have a number of speakers and themed sessions planned for the day in order to highlight the breadth and importance of the Economic Research being conducted across Scotland.

As well as this we have a number of other events planned, including our reception at the Scottish Parliament in December and one at the Scotland Office in London in October.

You’ll also see some unique content published in the coming months, including a podcast series with past institute directors and some articles on the history of the Institute, as well as some other eye-catching covers from some of our reports from over the years in the coming months.

In order to be kept up to date with any of these events and to be the first to know about our 50th anniversary publications, visit our website, fraserofallander.org and you can join our mailing list.

If you are interested in engaging with us also, whether you previously work for or with the institute, why not get in touch? We have a designated 50th anniversary e-mail fraser50@strath.ac.uk. We hope you’re as excited as we are and look forward to celebrating this exciting milestone with as many of you as possible.