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CEPR:
The European Network, Fifteen Years On
The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) was established in
1983 to promote independent, objective analysis and public discussion of
open economies and the relations among them. CEPR is not a traditional
in-house research institute or ‘think-tank’: it is the only research
network operating (mainly) throughout both Western and Eastern
Europe – a ‘think-net’. CEPR provides common services for them and
for the users of research, and it obtains funding for the activities it
develops. The Centre’s research covers areas that range from open
economy macroeconomics to economic history and demography, with
particular emphasis on all aspects of European integration.
CEPR was an original conception: a pure network, rather than an
in-house research centre, intended to encourage collaboration in
frontier research and its application to economic policy. The network
structure gave flexibility and avoided any institutional policy line. It
also permitted CEPR rapidly to become a European organization, bringing
many economists from outside the UK into its set of overlapping research
networks. And it enabled the Centre easily to promote interaction
between economists and historians, demographers, lawyers, and political
scientists.
The main differences between now and 1983 are scale and impact. The
initial body of 50 Research Fellows has grown to over 450 Fellows and
Affiliates; they were involved in 80 conferences, workshops, and
lunchtime meetings organized by CEPR in its fifteenth year, when they
also wrote 280 Discussion Papers and seven books published under CEPR
auspices. The Centre’s Bulletin and European Economic
Perspectives reach tens of thousands of readers. Economic Policy:
A European Forum, launched by the Centre in 1985, quickly became the
leading policy-oriented journal on this side of the Atlantic. And the
media extend the influence of CEPR’s work far beyond this
research-related community.
Impact has grown correspondingly. When asked, ‘Can you show that
CEPR research has influenced policy?’ we used to say that it takes
time to orient research towards policy-relevant questions, then to get
policy-makers to focus on it. Now we can point to explicit
acknowledgements from politicians, officials and journalists, and also
to many examples: how ministers have handled the ‘end-game’ of EMU,
proposals emerging for orderly workouts of international debt, the
thinking underlying calls for ‘flexible integration’ in the EU,
changes in European competition policy… Business should continue to be
good, whatever happens to the economy!
Richard Portes
President, CEPR
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