2021 Deane-Stone Lecture: Ambitious, Radical, Inclusive and Sustainable: How a National Statistical Institute evolved through Covid-19

NIESR is delighted to be re-launching the Deane-Stone Lecture on Economic Measurement, with guest speaker Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the UK’s National Statistician. 

This lecture takes as its starting point the changes that the ONS made during the Covid-19 pandemic to ensure that economic measurement not only remained of high-quality, but also became much more timely. It will look at other developments within the ONS in the pandemic, including the Covid-19 Infection Survey and Business Impacts of Coronavirus Survey (BICS).

Throughout, Sir Ian will argues that, in the 2020s, a world-class National Statistical Institute needs to do be working on a wide range of data to expand both the breadth and geographical granularity of its economic measurement; doing so in a way that is open to inclusive collaboration with the broader community, and transparent in explaining the methods and context of all its analysis.

About the Speaker

Professor Sir Ian Diamond became the UK’s National Statistician in October 2019. He is the principal adviser on official statistics to the UK Statistics Authority and the Government, as well as Head of the Government Statistical Service and the Government Analysis Function and a member of the UK Statistics Authority Board as Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary.

Sir Ian, a NIESR Governor, was knighted in 2013 for his services to social science and higher education, and before joining the ONS was the Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen until 31 July 2018.  He has authored or co-authored seven books and government reports, contributed to a further 34, and authored over 100 academic papers. In 2016 he led a review of University finance in Wales which was commissioned by the Welsh Government, which recommended that grants towards tuition fees should be replaced with support for living costs instead.

About the Deane-Stone Lecture

The Deane-Stone lecture was established to commemorate the work that Sir Richard Stone (1913–1991) and Professor Phyllis Deane undertook during the 1940s into the development of national income accounting (NIA) systems of measurement.  Much of this work was published jointly by ourselves and the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge. Professor Deane later left NIESR to join the Colonial Office where she remained until 1949.  She was a former president of the Royal Economic Society (1980-1982) and Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University.  Sir Richard Stone  was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1984 for this work. 

Past speakers at this lecture have included Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (2010), Sir Tony Atkinson (2008), Professor Kenneth Wallis (2005), Professor Vitor Gaspar (2003) and Professor Arnold Zellner (2001).

Watch the event here: