Jonathan Haskel

Stian Westlake

Traces the early twenty-first-century revolution through which heavy investments were made in such intangible assets as design, branding, and software, exploring the value of such developments, and how to best tap their potential.

The Rise of the Intangible Economy

Capitalism Without Capital

Richard Jackman

Long-term Unemployment and Special Employment Measures in Britain

Carol Corrado

Daniel Sichel

Javier Miranda

Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and expanding the measurement of innovation’s impacts on GDP in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing.

Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

L'ascesa dell'economia intangibile

Capitalismo senza capitale

From the acclaimed authors of Capitalism without Capital, radical ideas for restoring prosperity in today’s intangible economy The past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of other ills that have left people wondering what has happened to the future they were promised. Restarting the Future reveals how these problems arise from a failure to develop the institutions demanded by an economy now reliant on intangible capital such as ideas, relationships, brands, and knowledge. In this groundbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue that the great economic disappointment of the century is the result of an incomplete transition from an economy based on physical capital, and show how the vital institutions that underpin our economy remain geared to an outmoded way of doing business. The growth of intangible investment has slowed significantly in recent years, making the world poorer, less fair, and more vulnerable to existential threats. Haskel and Westlake present exciting new ideas to help us catch up with the intangible revolution, offering a road map for how to finance businesses, improve our cities, fund more science and research, reform monetary policy, and reshape intellectual property rules for the better. Drawing on Haskel and Westlake’s experience at the forefront of finance and economic policymaking, Restarting the Future sets out a host of radical but practical solutions that can lead us into the future.

How to Fix the Intangible Economy

Restarting the Future

"Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians. This task is timely and valuable given that policy and public interest in innovation has become increasingly intense in this era of digital revolution, yet National GDP Accounts and other economic statistics do not fully account for the wide range of innovative activity that is plainly evident in everyday experience. Indeed, innovation has in many ways changed the structure of an increasingly digitized marketplace, from cloud computing to the gig economy. The papers collected in this volume, Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century, address many different dimensions of this challenge, ranging from how to best to define GDP to the fundamental question of what is an innovation and how to collect data at the level of an individual innovation. Taken together, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of the cutting-edge of this widely varied but thematically-connected research that draws on multiple methodologies and data. The editors and authors consider how measurement frameworks could be expanded to enhance our understanding of innovative activity; new approaches and evidence that could account for innovation's economic impact; innovation's effect across the economy, from production processes to labor markets and financial activities; and what practical adjustments could be made to current measurements that would better capture innovation. The distinctive stance of this volume makes clear that the challenge of measuring innovation and understanding its implications has become increasingly complex as the economy has evolved. The editors and authors show that the limitations of our existing measurement system significantly hinder researchers, analysts, and policymakers. Better measures of innovative activity are necessary to interpret the consequences of innovation in daily life and to inform policies that best promote the attendant benefits, including distribution of income, trademark protections, and more. Now, in an era of fake news and alternative facts, it is more important than ever to push for accuracy in basic economic facts"--

"Restarting the Future argues that the big economic challenges facing the world are the result of our failure to deal with the implications of an economy dependent on knowledge, ideas and relationships. It examines why making this transition is so hard, and looks at ways forward in the fields of public policy, business and finance. The troubling state of rich-world economies (low productivity growth, high inequality, populist instability, climate crisis) is significantly the result of the troubled and incomplete shift to a new type of economy - specifically, the move from an economy dependent on tangible capital to one dependent on intangible capital. At the heart of the problem is a significant slowdown in the pace of intangible investment since the financial crisis. (There were some early signs of this at the time the authors were writing their previous book, Capitalism without Capital, but new data now makes the severity and persistence of this slowdown clear.) This slowdown has happened because we lack the right institutions and strategies to encourage intangible investment and channel it effectively. What is more, there are significant groups with an interest in stopping these new institutions emerging. Contrary to the dominant narrative that focuses on the tension between a successful, future-facing "elite" and a mass of low-status "left-behinds", the authors argue that many of the people and organisations with an interest in holding back the future are affluent and high-status, including affluent retirees, established financial institutions and graduate knowledge workers. Haskel & Westlake survey attempts to fix these institutional problems, explaining how they work in the context of the intangible economy, and what the upside to solving them might be. They describe interesting and topical policy experiments and business strategies (such as Preston's Local Economic Strategy, or topical new business models like WeWork and CloudKitchens) and set them in a novel economic context. (Specifically, these sections look at city policy, business finance and investment, public investment, competition policy, monetary policy, mitigating climate change and business strategies for tangible-based firms. The authors close the book with a political programme for how to get over the teething troubles of the new economy"--

Jonathan Haskel

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