Diane Coyle
Biographic Data
| ID | 84034 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diane Coyle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diane |
| FAMILY NAME | Coyle |
| SIGNATURE | COYLE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7243-1641 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1336 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Social trust and productivity: Evidence from European Nuts-2 regions
Social trust is widely recognised as an important intangible asset shaping macroeconomic performance, yet the channels through which it operates remain imperfectly understood. This study examines its role in explaining regional productivity differences across Europe since 2008. Using survey-based trust measures from the European Social Survey (ESS) and newly constructed NUTS-2 total factor productivity data, we find a robust and statistically sig…
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
Why do we use eighty-year-old metrics to understand today’s economy? The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress , Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers r…
The inefficiency of centralised control and political short-termism: The case of the Prison Service in England and Wales
A paradox of the New Public Management reform – an influential school of thought in the management of public services in some countries – is that, despite its rhetoric of discretion for public managers, governments frequently reassert direct input controls at the expense of managerial freedoms to deliver – and be held accountable for – agreed output/outcome objectives. The existing literature explains this by highlighting elite incentive structur…
St Century Progress in Computing
In the search for explanations for slower productivity growth since the mid-2000s in many countries, one possibility is a slower pace of progress in digital technologies. In this paper we show that the cost of computation has continued to decline rapidly, taking into account innovation in chip types and cloud computing. This is a continuation of its long-run trend; the decline has slowed since 2010, but not earlier. As firms use computational pow…
The Governance of the BBC
The governance of the BBC has been a subject of political debate for the past two decades, which have brought two major upheavals in the corporation's governance structure. Yet, governance reform was not the best way to address the editorial and cultural crises that led to demands for change; and the current model is not adequate to protect licence fee payers’ interests and the BBC's independence, particularly in the context of continuing ideolog…
Recent trends in firm‐level total factor productivity in the UK: New measures, new puzzles
Understanding the poor productivity performance of the UK economy since the financial crisis is complicated by the well‐known challenges in estimating total factor productivity (TFP) using only revenue data. We develop a structural framework to infer quality‐adjusted TFP from an estimated firm‐level revenue function. We use microdata for two sectors previously identified as being significant contributors to the UK's productivity growth slowdown—m…
The right kind of growth for everyone: Policy Challenges During the Digital and Green Transformations
The UK, like other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies, has experienced a dismal decade and a half since the financial crisis. The reason lies in the dual technological transition, energy and digital, which is prompting structural shifts in the economy that require a co-ordinated policy response. This implies the need for more co-ordinated policies and more active intervention in the structure of the economy th…
Assessing policy co-ordination in government: Text and network analysis of the UK's economic strategies
Lack of consistency has long been noted as a weakness in government policy-making, but it has previously been difficult to assess the extent of the absence of strategic co-ordination. This paper investigates this shortcoming by applying computational linguistics and network tools to provide some evidence on the lack of policy co-ordination in the UK. We use two key economic strategy documents produced during the Johnson administration—the 2021 Pl…
Levelling up policies and the failure to learn
UK policy targeting regional economic disparities has been characterised by frequent reversals and announcements, with multiple, uncoordinated public bodies, departments and levels of government responsible for delivery. Prior ‘place-blind' national policies have given way recently to ‘place-based' approaches, with a convergence between industrial and spatial policies. Yet a consequence of inconsistency and poor co-ordination is that the UK polic…
Automating the Economic Style of Reasoning
This essay focuses on three themes that emerge from Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy: the concept of efficiency in economics; the politics of the rise of economistic efficiency; and the changes in the discipline of economics itself during the past three decades or so. The book is a historical and institutional account of how a broad spectrum of policies set in Washington DC b…
Free Digital Products and Aggregate Economic Measurement
International audience
From Covid-19 to Green Recovery with natural capital accounting
The COVID-19 pandemic and related social and economic emergencies induced massive public spending and increased global debt. Economic recovery is now an opportunity to rebuild natural capital alongside financial, physical, social and human capital, for long-term societal benefit. Yet, current decision-making is dominated by economic imperatives and information systems that do not consider society’s dependence on natural capital and the ecosystem …
Diagnosing the UK productivity slowdown: Which sectors matter and why
This paper explores the slowdown in labour productivity growth in the UK and other advanced economies by decomposing its growth into contributions from different sectors of the economy, looking at both within‐industry productivity growth and labour reallocation between sectors. We find that the within‐industry contribution is the main source of the slowdown. Comparing trends pre‐ and post‐2008, the aggregate productivity slowdown can be attribute…
The Public Option
People value highly the digital technologies that are so pervasive in everyday life and work, certainly as measured by economists. Yet there are also evident harms associated with them, including the likelihood that they are affecting political discourse and choices. The features of digital markets mean they tend toward monopoly, so great economic and political power lies in the hands of a small number of giant companies. While tougher regulation…
Crisis and state transformation: Covid-19, levelling up and the UK’s incoherent state
This article provides a novel account of recent UK governance reforms, describing what can be termed an ‘incoherent’ state, ill-equipped to address complex, multi-dimensional policy challenges. This is evidenced through two interrelated case-studies: Covid-19 and levelling up. We highlight how the tradition of strongly centralised government combined with an ad hoc approach to reform has undermined inter-governmental relations and limited the pos…
Respecting the subject in wellbeing public policy: Beyond the social planner perspective
We compare and evaluate two competing paradigms in the ‘wellbeing public policy’ (WPP) space with the intention of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. We argue that most WPP proposals adopt the same ‘social planner perspective’ (SPP) that undergirds conventional economic policy analysis. The SPP is broadly technocratic, emphasising scientific standards for what constitutes good policy and empowering ‘dispassionate’ experts. We argue that WPP co…
Telecoms Deflators: A Story of Volume and Revenue Weights
We draw up an inventory of entitlements related to social benefits and social support available locally to beneficiaries of the Revenu de Solidarit Active (RSA, the current scheme of minimum income) in 20 French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We then compare the social scales inventoried in 2020 to those collected in 2001 and 2007, i.e. prior to the switch from the previous minimum income scheme (RMI) to the RSA. We show an overall …
Socializing Data
Will the proliferation of data enable AI to deliver progress? An ever-growing swath of life is available as digitally captured and stored data records. Effective government, business management, and even personal life are increasingly suggested to be a matter of using AI to interpret and act on the data. This optimism should be tempered with caution. Data cannot capture much of the richness of life, and while AI has great potential for beneficial…
Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
English Devolution and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Governing Dilemmas in the Shadow of the Treasury
This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial…
Natural capital in climate models
No plant, no problem? Factoryless manufacturing, economic measurement and national manufacturing policies
‘Factoryless manufacturing’ describes the strategic decision by businesses to contract out part or all of their production, sometimes overseas. Although it has become widespread in some sectors of manufacturing, the phenomenon is not captured by existing economic statistics. This implies that the decline of manufacturing, often a focus of policy, may be overstated, while trade statistics fail to reflect globalized production. We present web-scrap…
Preface – National Accounting: Old Questions Revisited, Plus Some New Ones
in a manner fully consistent with the SNA methodology. Their results show substantial increases in inequality -including a global increase since 1980 despite the growth of China and India -but with substantial differences across countries. Given the way the pandemic is amplifying existing inequalities, it seems likely distribution will remain in sharp focus, in a welcome return to the tradition of early national accountants including Simon Kuznet…
A Comparison of Deflators for Telecommunications Services Output
Abdirahman Mo, Coyle Diane, Heys Richard, Stewart Will. Une comparaison de déflateurs pour les services de télécommunications / A Comparison of Deflators for Telecommunications Services Output . In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°517-519, 2020. Numéro spécial : Au-delà et autour du PIB : questions à la comptabilité nationale / Special Issue : Beyond and Around GDP: Questions to National Accounting pp. 107-128
The imperial treasury: Appraisal methodology and regional economic performance in the UK
The disparity between the least and most productive regions in the UK is wide by the standards of many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. An important factor is the concentration of public investment around London. The appraisal process for infrastructure investment projects follows the methodology set out in HM Treasury’s The Green Book. It is argued that this methodology has reinforced the regional im…
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History - Revised and expanded Edition
Levelling up policies and the failure to learn
UK policy targeting regional economic disparities has been characterised by frequent reversals and announcements, with multiple, uncoordinated public bodies, departments and levels of government responsible for delivery. Prior ‘place-blind' national policies have given way recently to ‘place-based' approaches, with a convergence between industrial and spatial policies. Yet a consequence of inconsistency and poor co-ordination is that the UK polic…
The imperial treasury: Appraisal methodology and regional economic performance in the UK
The disparity between the least and most productive regions in the UK is wide by the standards of many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. An important factor is the concentration of public investment around London. The appraisal process for infrastructure investment projects follows the methodology set out in HM Treasury’s The Green Book. It is argued that this methodology has reinforced the regional im…
Crisis and state transformation: Covid-19, levelling up and the UK’s incoherent state
This article provides a novel account of recent UK governance reforms, describing what can be termed an ‘incoherent’ state, ill-equipped to address complex, multi-dimensional policy challenges. This is evidenced through two interrelated case-studies: Covid-19 and levelling up. We highlight how the tradition of strongly centralised government combined with an ad hoc approach to reform has undermined inter-governmental relations and limited the pos…
English Devolution and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Governing Dilemmas in the Shadow of the Treasury
This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial…
Diagnosing the UK productivity slowdown: Which sectors matter and why
This paper explores the slowdown in labour productivity growth in the UK and other advanced economies by decomposing its growth into contributions from different sectors of the economy, looking at both within‐industry productivity growth and labour reallocation between sectors. We find that the within‐industry contribution is the main source of the slowdown. Comparing trends pre‐ and post‐2008, the aggregate productivity slowdown can be attribute…
No plant, no problem? Factoryless manufacturing, economic measurement and national manufacturing policies
‘Factoryless manufacturing’ describes the strategic decision by businesses to contract out part or all of their production, sometimes overseas. Although it has become widespread in some sectors of manufacturing, the phenomenon is not captured by existing economic statistics. This implies that the decline of manufacturing, often a focus of policy, may be overstated, while trade statistics fail to reflect globalized production. We present web-scrap…
The right kind of growth for everyone: Policy Challenges During the Digital and Green Transformations
The UK, like other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies, has experienced a dismal decade and a half since the financial crisis. The reason lies in the dual technological transition, energy and digital, which is prompting structural shifts in the economy that require a co-ordinated policy response. This implies the need for more co-ordinated policies and more active intervention in the structure of the economy th…
From Covid-19 to Green Recovery with natural capital accounting
The COVID-19 pandemic and related social and economic emergencies induced massive public spending and increased global debt. Economic recovery is now an opportunity to rebuild natural capital alongside financial, physical, social and human capital, for long-term societal benefit. Yet, current decision-making is dominated by economic imperatives and information systems that do not consider society’s dependence on natural capital and the ecosystem …
The inefficiency of centralised control and political short-termism: The case of the Prison Service in England and Wales
A paradox of the New Public Management reform – an influential school of thought in the management of public services in some countries – is that, despite its rhetoric of discretion for public managers, governments frequently reassert direct input controls at the expense of managerial freedoms to deliver – and be held accountable for – agreed output/outcome objectives. The existing literature explains this by highlighting elite incentive structur…
Respecting the subject in wellbeing public policy: Beyond the social planner perspective
We compare and evaluate two competing paradigms in the ‘wellbeing public policy’ (WPP) space with the intention of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. We argue that most WPP proposals adopt the same ‘social planner perspective’ (SPP) that undergirds conventional economic policy analysis. The SPP is broadly technocratic, emphasising scientific standards for what constitutes good policy and empowering ‘dispassionate’ experts. We argue that WPP co…
Telecoms Deflators: A Story of Volume and Revenue Weights
We draw up an inventory of entitlements related to social benefits and social support available locally to beneficiaries of the Revenu de Solidarit Active (RSA, the current scheme of minimum income) in 20 French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We then compare the social scales inventoried in 2020 to those collected in 2001 and 2007, i.e. prior to the switch from the previous minimum income scheme (RMI) to the RSA. We show an overall …
Natural capital in climate models
Economics: The weightless economy
The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
How not to educate the information age workforce
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History - Revised and expanded Edition
The Future of the National Accounts: Statistics and the Democratic Conversation
All to play for in measuring the economy
Dual Disruptions: Brexit and Technology
the uk faces two significant economic challenges in the years ahead: Brexit, and digital disruption. They are likely to reinforce each other. Although there are largely separate public debates about each, businesses, policymakers and citizens will have to deal with both at the same time. To make matters worse, they are going to interact in challenging ways. It is not obvious that the British state has the capacity to develop a strategic approach …
The imperial treasury: Appraisal methodology and regional economic performance in the UK
The disparity between the least and most productive regions in the UK is wide by the standards of many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. An important factor is the concentration of public investment around London. The appraisal process for infrastructure investment projects follows the methodology set out in HM Treasury’s The Green Book. It is argued that this methodology has reinforced the regional im…
Do‐it‐yourself Digital: The Production Boundary, the Productivity Puzzle and Economic Welfare
Part of the debate about the ‘productivity puzzle’ concerns potential mismeasurement of GDP due to digital activities. This paper discusses some measurement issues arising from digitally‐enabled substitutions in activity across the conventional production boundary. Production boundary issues are not new, as conventionally defined GDP statistics account for the monetary cost but not the time cost of consumption and production. This means that chan…
Natural capital in climate models
No plant, no problem? Factoryless manufacturing, economic measurement and national manufacturing policies
‘Factoryless manufacturing’ describes the strategic decision by businesses to contract out part or all of their production, sometimes overseas. Although it has become widespread in some sectors of manufacturing, the phenomenon is not captured by existing economic statistics. This implies that the decline of manufacturing, often a focus of policy, may be overstated, while trade statistics fail to reflect globalized production. We present web-scrap…
Preface – National Accounting: Old Questions Revisited, Plus Some New Ones
in a manner fully consistent with the SNA methodology. Their results show substantial increases in inequality -including a global increase since 1980 despite the growth of China and India -but with substantial differences across countries. Given the way the pandemic is amplifying existing inequalities, it seems likely distribution will remain in sharp focus, in a welcome return to the tradition of early national accountants including Simon Kuznet…
A Comparison of Deflators for Telecommunications Services Output
Abdirahman Mo, Coyle Diane, Heys Richard, Stewart Will. Une comparaison de déflateurs pour les services de télécommunications / A Comparison of Deflators for Telecommunications Services Output . In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°517-519, 2020. Numéro spécial : Au-delà et autour du PIB : questions à la comptabilité nationale / Special Issue : Beyond and Around GDP: Questions to National Accounting pp. 107-128
Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
English Devolution and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Governing Dilemmas in the Shadow of the Treasury
This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial…
The Public Option
People value highly the digital technologies that are so pervasive in everyday life and work, certainly as measured by economists. Yet there are also evident harms associated with them, including the likelihood that they are affecting political discourse and choices. The features of digital markets mean they tend toward monopoly, so great economic and political power lies in the hands of a small number of giant companies. While tougher regulation…
Crisis and state transformation: Covid-19, levelling up and the UK’s incoherent state
This article provides a novel account of recent UK governance reforms, describing what can be termed an ‘incoherent’ state, ill-equipped to address complex, multi-dimensional policy challenges. This is evidenced through two interrelated case-studies: Covid-19 and levelling up. We highlight how the tradition of strongly centralised government combined with an ad hoc approach to reform has undermined inter-governmental relations and limited the pos…
Respecting the subject in wellbeing public policy: Beyond the social planner perspective
We compare and evaluate two competing paradigms in the ‘wellbeing public policy’ (WPP) space with the intention of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. We argue that most WPP proposals adopt the same ‘social planner perspective’ (SPP) that undergirds conventional economic policy analysis. The SPP is broadly technocratic, emphasising scientific standards for what constitutes good policy and empowering ‘dispassionate’ experts. We argue that WPP co…
Telecoms Deflators: A Story of Volume and Revenue Weights
We draw up an inventory of entitlements related to social benefits and social support available locally to beneficiaries of the Revenu de Solidarit Active (RSA, the current scheme of minimum income) in 20 French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We then compare the social scales inventoried in 2020 to those collected in 2001 and 2007, i.e. prior to the switch from the previous minimum income scheme (RMI) to the RSA. We show an overall …
Socializing Data
Will the proliferation of data enable AI to deliver progress? An ever-growing swath of life is available as digitally captured and stored data records. Effective government, business management, and even personal life are increasingly suggested to be a matter of using AI to interpret and act on the data. This optimism should be tempered with caution. Data cannot capture much of the richness of life, and while AI has great potential for beneficial…
Assessing policy co-ordination in government: Text and network analysis of the UK's economic strategies
Lack of consistency has long been noted as a weakness in government policy-making, but it has previously been difficult to assess the extent of the absence of strategic co-ordination. This paper investigates this shortcoming by applying computational linguistics and network tools to provide some evidence on the lack of policy co-ordination in the UK. We use two key economic strategy documents produced during the Johnson administration—the 2021 Pl…
Levelling up policies and the failure to learn
UK policy targeting regional economic disparities has been characterised by frequent reversals and announcements, with multiple, uncoordinated public bodies, departments and levels of government responsible for delivery. Prior ‘place-blind' national policies have given way recently to ‘place-based' approaches, with a convergence between industrial and spatial policies. Yet a consequence of inconsistency and poor co-ordination is that the UK polic…
Automating the Economic Style of Reasoning
This essay focuses on three themes that emerge from Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy: the concept of efficiency in economics; the politics of the rise of economistic efficiency; and the changes in the discipline of economics itself during the past three decades or so. The book is a historical and institutional account of how a broad spectrum of policies set in Washington DC b…
Free Digital Products and Aggregate Economic Measurement
International audience
Economics (21 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Business (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Macroeconomics (5 works) · Market economy (5 works) · Public Administration (5 works) · Public Administration (5 works)