The Economics Enrichment series is an initiative designed to bring external economic perspectives to the major challenges and priority areas that DESNZ is working on. The series aims to foster stronger connections across professions and ensure that economic thinking is shared more widely in an accessible and engaging way. By inviting leading experts to share their insights, these sessions offer a fresh lens on critical issues – helping us think about them from an economics-relevant perspective while encouraging cross-professional collaboration.
For this session, we are very pleased to be joined by Professor Anna Valero, Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics and Director of the Growth Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance. Anna is a leading applied economist whose work focuses on productivity, innovation, industrial strategy and sustainable growth, including the net zero transition. She currently serves as Industrial Strategy Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, and has played an important role in policy thinking on sustainable growth and the UK’s industrial strategy.
Anna will discuss how economic evidence can inform green industrial policy, drawing on recent LSE work on identifying comparative advantages in clean technologies, understanding innovation spillovers, and the links between university research and commercialised clean tech innovation. The session will also include insights from recent work on climate adaptation technologies and services, with clear relevance to the UK’s net zero, growth and industrial strategy agendas.
This promises to be a particularly valuable session for colleagues working on energy, investment, innovation, industrial strategy, economic growth and the wider net zero transition. The event is open to colleagues across civil service professions and will include a presentation followed by Q&A and discussion.