Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE III)

We propose a centre to meet the challenge of integrating history and institutions into UK evidence-based policy. The popular 'what works' approach has achieved much but needs to be augmented with knowledge about the hard-to-measure factors that are influential for practical policy success: social norms, culture, implicit incentives, analytical frames, and intrinsic motivation. Importantly, these factors all have roots in historical circumstances. Our research programme addresses historical roots, the structure of institutions and policy design problems to fill this gap and promote the goal of inclusive growth.

Furthermore, while the centre is based in the economics discipline, CAGE from its inception has always taken an interdisciplinary approach. For this phase, theme 1 is a collaboration of economics and history, theme 2 is a collaboration between economics, psychology and anthropology, theme 3 is a collaboration between economics and medical sciences, and theme 4 between economics, statistics and computer science. Each theme uses insights and techniques from data science to empirically test hypotheses. This unique character will be further reinforced by the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Advisory Group (IAG) that will help develop collaborative research initiatives.

CAGE's research programme on history and institutions is anchored with a creative set of flagship initiatives such as: the digitisation of 'lost' UK economic history data, the development of a database for analysing information overload, historical firm-level databases for India and the UK, and a series of UK field experiments related to mental health services, council-level environmental partnerships, and micro-level pollution management. These projects will build on CAGE's achievements since 2009 in developing knowledge regarding the history of economic growth, the analysis of well-being, and innovative approaches to policy design. Crucially, CAGE's research team have published at a high level in economics as well as other disciplines, putting them in the position to be an important connector within UK social science.

Our capacity-building programme is designed to stimulate the development of new cohorts of researchers and policy practitioners, starting with secondary schools and introducing undergraduates to research tools according to a systematic training plan. This programme will also be targeted towards increasing the socio-economic diversity of the research and policy-making community. At CAGE, we have learned that long-term capacity and co-ordination is built up through high-quality networks. We will continue our successful Media Fellow and Policy Fellow programmes (in partnership with the Government Economic Service (GES)), with a focus on links with data journalists and local policy-makers. In particular, our planned open data resources and policy trials targeted at local councils will help to diffuse rigorous, evidence-based policy-making into new areas where practical guidance has traditionally been scarce.