2024 Deane- Stone Lecture with Huw Dixon: the Challenges of Measuring Inflation in a Post-Pandemic World

For both policymakers and economists, the post-pandemic spike in inflation raised several questions around the measurement of inflation and the implication of inflation for how we measure the economy more generally.

In this year’s Deane-Stone Lecture on Economic Measurement, Professor Huw Dixon will focus on how the rising costs of food and energy encapsulated in the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ caused particular challenges for the two official measures of inflation. He will explore how the presence of high inflation, combined with the very high levels of post-pandemic public debt, led to misleading conventional measures of public-finances and discuss a range of issues within the ‘crisis’ such as higher mortgage payments.