Following the UNSW-ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement at UNSW Sydney, ESCoE Leadership Executive member/UNSW’s Kevin Fox reflects on the event.
ESCoE conferences have quickly established a tradition of bringing together leading international experts on economic measurement from government, academia and business. I am proud to say that the first UNSW-ESCoE conference continued this tradition, with a programme that represented the diversity of the community and topics of research.
The head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Dr David Gruen AO, opened the event by noting how collaboration with UNSW researchers led to the use of supermarket scanner data in the Australian Consumer Price Index in 2017, and highlighted areas where collaboration between academics and national statistical offices can lead to further impact. This set the tone for the rest of the conference, where some of the hardest problems were addressed and future collaborative research agendas planned.
We heard two keynote talks from Jonathan Haskel (Imperial College London and former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member) and Paul Schreyer (ESCoE Advisory Board member and former OECD Chief Statistician), as well as two special sessions and a range of contributed sessions.
Productivity and intangible assets
Jonathan Haskel explored productivity trends and the role of intangible assets (like software, research and development and intellectual property) in modern business. He highlighted the slowdown in productivity growth post-Global Financial Crisis, the pandemic period, and the post-pandemic era. He emphasised the importance of intangible assets in driving productivity, using examples of leading tech companies like Microsoft and Apple. He also outlined measurement challenges and the need for policies that support an intangible-intensive economy. He finished by discussing the growing gap between leading and lagging firms.
Digital and environmental transformations
Paul Schreyer spoke about the impact of digital and environmental transformations on depreciation and depletion in economic measurement. He emphasised the need to consider these factors in economic analysis and the importance of aligning business accounting with National Accounts to better reflect the impact of environmental and regulatory changes on asset depreciation and economic measurement.
Micro data research in economics
Special session 1 focused on micro data research in economics and was organised by e61, a Sydney-based economics research institute. All three papers in this session used large data sets from innovative sources to question accepted narratives.
Aaron Wong (e61) presented his research on earnings variation across Australia. He highlighted the significant impact of location on earnings, particularly in areas with rich infrastructure and natural resources. He showed that location effects explain about half of the variation in worker earnings and discussed policy implications, such as improving infrastructure and considering place-based policies for workers in less well-paid areas.
Jack Buckley (e61) presented his research on teacher attrition in Australia, showing relatively low attrition rates compared to other occupations, contrary to claims often expressed in policy debates. He explored reasons for his findings, including pay rises and the impact of initial teacher education.
Finally, Alexandra de Gendre (University of Melbourne) presented her research on same-sex teacher effects on student learning outcomes. The popularly accepted narrative is that such effects must be large. However, her study found small positive effects in secondary education, but only tiny positive effects in just 46% of countries examined. Key conclusions are that policies that aim for students to have same-sex teachers will not close performance gaps but may reduce occupational segregation in high-income countries.
Environmental economic accounting
Special session 2 was a panel discussion on environmental economic accounting, featuring Carl Obst, Erwin Diewert and Paul Schreyer and chaired by Alicia Rambladi.
Carl Obst presented a paper on natural capital and environmental accounting, emphasising the importance of measuring changes in real wealth and sustainability. He discussed the relationship between welfare and exchange values, highlighting the need for a structured approach to collecting non-market information on ecosystem services.
Erwin Diewert presented work on the treatment of insurance in environmental accounting, focusing on the measurement of income, output, input, and wealth, and the role of user costs in insurance.
Paul Schreyer discussed the importance of understanding the differences between exchange values and welfare values, and the challenges of incorporating holding gains into income and production measures. The panel discussion addressed the role of government in insurance, the impact of zoning on land values, and the importance of understanding the public and private aspects of insurance.
Catch up online
If you couldn’t join us in Sydney or missed any of the talks, slides and recordings from selected sessions and interviews with keynote speakers Paul Schreyer and Jonathan Haskel are now available on our website.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who made this event possible, including the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UNSW Business School and School of Economics, and Erwin and Virginia Diewert.
What’s next?
The next UNSW-ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement will take place on 4-5 December 2025 at UNSW Sydney.
Before then, you may want to attend ESCoE’s 2025 Conference on Economic Measurement to take place from 21-23 May 2025 at King’s College London. The call for papers is open until 13 January, with registrations opening in March.
ESCoE blogs are published to further debate. Any views expressed are solely those of the author(s) and so cannot be taken to represent those of the ESCoE, its partner institutions or the Office for National Statistics.