Bart van Ark, Managing Director of the Productivity Institute.
You recently moved from the US to the UK to take up your new role as Managing Director of the Productivity Institute. What attracted you to the role and are there any lessons the UK can learn from the US in terms of tackling productivity?
Personally, it’s a great opportunity for me to lead the Productivity Institute. Productivity has been a focal point for most of my academic career, especially when I was at the University of Groningen in the 1990s and early 2000 where I led the European Growth and Productivity Accounting network (EUKLEMS). Subsequently, as Chief Economist at The Conference Board, which is global business think tank headquartered in New York, I worked with the business and policy community on productivity-related topics such as workforce skills, digital transformation and organisational change. Currently I’m ‘drinking from the firehose’ to understand the specifics of the UK productivity puzzle. But there are many insights from elsewhere we can learn from. One is the amazing ability in the US to scale up any activity to generate large productivity gains. Another is the effective coordination of productivity-related policies across different levels of government and regions in Germany. Those are just two key issues I’d like to look at in more detail in the UK context.
This is not the first time we are trying to tackle the productivity problem in the UK. How do you think the Institute might contribute to advance the debate and resolution?
In our bid to the ESRC/UKRI we stressed a few principles that will help us build on previous initiatives such as the Productivity Insights Network. This Institute is very broad-based covering nine academic entities in the UK; it will build eight Regional Productivity Forums across the nation; it will set a National Productivity Council which should become the go-to place for the national policy community; and we are building strong international collaborations, for example with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and national Productivity Commissions. Importantly, we are also adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the issues. The productivity debate is often dominated by economists, but the Institute has a good share of scholars from data science, education, engineering, geography, innovation studies, management and political science. Finally, the funding structure of the Institute is very flexible. We are starting with eight themes ranging from human, organisational and knowledge investment to institutional and governance issues. But over the five years we want to focus on the connecting points between the themes and potentially build new ones.
What are your ambitions/plans for the first few months for the Institute and, more specifically, how does the current pandemic situation play into this?
Unfortunately, the UK has become ‘ground zero’ when it comes to the productivity puzzle and COVID-19 has made the challenges even bigger. There are many problems, but our main concerns are the chronic underinvestment in human, organisation and knowledge capital, and a fragmented policy environment at frankly all levels of government which prevents investments from bearing full fruit in using precious resources efficiently and creating the maximum benefit to society. More concretely we have defined a series of projects for the first six months of the Institute’s life on how COVID might impact the productivity of virtual working, the relationship between technology and productivity in health care, and the acceleration of green investment programs to stimulate the economy. We will start early on with an engagement program with the business and policy community at regional level on those and other productivity-related topics.
If you could invite anyone to dinner (a living or historical figure) who would you invite and what would you ask them?
May I choose two historical figures instead of one? I would love to be a fly on the wall if Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes could meet to discuss productivity in the context of today’s digital economy. I would love to hear what Adam Smith would to say on how society is coping today in assuring that the benefits from technological change and division of labour go to those who make it happen in the first place. And I wonder if Keynes would still feel as confident as he was in 1930 that the 15-hour working week would be around the corner and that it would make us happier. Who knows; we can distill the answers from just trying to imagine what they might have said.