The Economy 2030 Inquiry: navigating a decade of change

This ambitious project is the first funded through the Nuffield Foundation’s Strategic Fund. It will explore three major changes facing the UK economy – Brexit, and COVID-19 and the transition to a zero-carbon future. The Economy 2030 Inquiry seeks to better understand how the UK can respond to these challenges in a way which will improve people’s economic outcomes and wider well-being, against a backdrop of stagnant living standards, slow productivity growth and high levels of inequality.

Currently, the UK does not have an overarching strategy for managing the changes that will confront people in the jobs they do, the places they live, and the firms where they work. These issues are largely considered in isolation, and often in a reactive way, risking poor policy choices that fail to reflect interdependencies between these different drivers of economic change – or interaction with the economy’s endowments, comparative advantages, and weaknesses.

Economy 2030, a new collaboration between the Resolution Foundation and LSE, will conduct a two-year structured national conversation to build shared awareness and understanding of the economic challenges, trade-offs and policy options facing the UK, and identify pathways on which policymakers might act. The Inquiry will draw on a breadth of expertise from across the UK, connecting rigorous research, public involvement, political engagement, and concrete proposals for change. The project will address new questions in response to emerging findings, but initially will encompass the following research themes:

• The impact of change: how people, places and firms have experienced and responded to change.
• The drivers of change: the change being brought by Brexit, COVID-19 and net zero and how to respond to it.
• Cross-cutting themes: the role of government and the constraints it is under; lessons from UK and other countries histories, successes and failures in navigating economic change; the lived experience of economic change – people’s perspectives and experiences of change as workers, consumers and citizens.

A small Commission which will provide the Inquiry’s strategic leadership, encourage new thinking and help set the direction for future work. The Commission comprises:  

• Baroness Minouche Shafik, Director of London School of Economics and Political Science
• Sir Clive Cowdery, Founder of the Resolution Foundation and chairman of the Resolution Group
• Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University
• Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress
• Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, Former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry
• Lord Nicholas Stern, I G Patel Chair of Economics and Government, LSE
• Adam Tooze, Professor of History, Columbia University

Ending Stagnation: A New Economic Strategy for Britain

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