Cambridge Judge Business School Discussions on Economics & Policy

Is the globalisation which has shaped our world over recent decades slowing or even moving backwards in the wake of the Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump as US president, asks the first podcast in the Cambridge Judge Business Debate series.

Students at business schools should think like biologists, according to acknowledged advertising authority Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy & Mather UK. Conventional economic theory is extraordinarily narrow, blind to ethics, psychology, path-dependence and to marketing. Adopting aspects of evolutionary biology, psychology and behavioural science will create binocular vision and a different way of looking at problems.

As pressure again mounts in the Eurozone leading Cambridge economist Michael Kitson says the euro might 'stagger on' for a few more years but eventually it will collapse. Policy makers have been papering over the cracks in the Eurozone and causing major problems for many member countries which are trapped by tight fiscal rules.

As the European Parliament sets about reforming the EU Emission Trading System that is at the centre of Europe's climate policy, Dr David Reiner says it does work but has suffered in the recession and economic downturn.

Alexander McLean, Founder and Director General of the UK-based charity The African Prisons Project (APP), talks about the work it is carrying out and the part played by Cambridge Judge Business School’s General Management Programme. APP’s initial focus was to improve education and health in prisons by refurbishing libraries and medical facilities. Now, having worked with over 20,000 prisoners in Uganda, Kenya and Sierra Leone, attention is switching to leadership development for senior and middle management in African prison services.

When austerity policies are linked positively to structured measures and discipline at a macro-economic level, the strategy works. However, just rapid and deep austerity cuts do not. Dr Christos Pitelis warns that austerity measures on their own forces governments to simultaneously take steps to improve economic competitiveness, causing output to fall followed by a failure to revive economies. Austerity measures alone are widely seen as a bad move.

Michael Kitson calls 2010-2020 a lost decade for the world economy. What is needed now, he argues, is a high level of aggregate demand and continued investment in new technology and innovation coupled with a major shift in economic thinking.

Michael Kitson compares the current global recession to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and feels that austerity is here for a long time unless there is a change in economic policy globally as we well as in the UK.

Dr Loretta Napoleoni discusses the themes from her latest book Maonomics - Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do. China, she says, has reaped the benefits of Western-invented globalisation and deregulation, yet its economic development offers lessons to the West as the West stumbles from crisis to crisis.

As the government prepares to announce an overhaul of the UK's immigration policies, Michael Kitson says raising controls now may negatively affect the country's innovation and long-term future growth.