News on GGDC staff

Professors Abe de Jong and Herman de Jong received a grant of 160,000 euro for a UG ICT Innovation Fund Proposal titled Digitization of printed registries to structured data. The project’s idea is to deliver a machine learning-powered online platform to...

Last month GGDC director Robert Inklaar, gave an interview for the Open Science blog of the University of Groningen Library. Part of open science is that researchers make their data FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But how to do...

Hagen Kruse and Gaaitzen de Vries, together with Kei-Mu Yi and Yabo Vidogbena (both at the University of Houston), have obtained a research grant from STEG/CEPR. They will take a quantitative modelling approach to investigate the driving forces of...

The paper “A manufacturing renaissance? Industrialization trends in the developing world” written by Hagen Kruse, Emmanuel Mensah, Kunal Sen, and Gaaitzen de Vries has been published in the IMF Economic Review.

Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert have won the 2021 Kendrick prize during the 37th IARIW General Conference held in August in Luxembourg. Their paper titled ‘Natural Resources and Missing Inputs in International Productivity Comparisons’ was...

The paper "Jobs and Productivity Growth in Global Value Chains: New Evidence for Twenty-five Low- and Middle-Income Countries", written by Stefan Pahl, Marcel Timmer, Reitze Gouma, and Pieter Woltjer, has been accepted for publication in the The World Bank...

Jutta Bolt has been awarded a Wallenberg Academy Fellows prolongation grant for five years to investigate historical disease patterns in Africa. The current pandemic is a forceful reminder of the global importance of good health for all. But at the same...

Herman de Jong received a large NWO-OC grant funding a project to investigate the function of the Amsterdam stock exchange during the period 1870-1940. The aim of this project is to probe the stock exchange’s contribution to corporate finance and economic...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar are both in the Dutch Economists Top 40, compiled annually by the journal ESB, on places 35 and 39. On the separate list of highest scoring economists in 2019, Robert Inklaar comes in at third place. The main ranking is...

Jutta Bolt has just been appointed to one of the University of Groningen's Aletta Jacobs chairs. These chairs were created to give female associate professors a leg up, to achieve a less male-dominated professoriat. As GGDC, we heartily congratulate Jutta...

In early December, several media outlets paid attention to a report written by Bart Los and Jouke van Dijk (UG, Faculty of Spatial Sciences), about the employment impact of the large NortH2 hydrogen project for the North of the Netherlands in general and...

Following the appointment of Bart van Ark as director of the new Productivity Institute, he has been appointed as honorary professor at FEB to emphasise his continued engagement with the University of Groningen, see here for more details.

On September 1, Robert Inklaar has taken over as director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) from Marcel Timmer.

Herman de Jong received a large grant for building a new Dutch database holding Dutch corporate and stock exchange data for the period 1796-1980. The grant is awarded by the KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Science) in cooperation with digital infrastructures...

Together with UG-colleagues Thijs Broekhuizen, Sierdjan Koster and Arjen Edzes and several experts from non-academic circles, Bart Los wrote the first edition of De Staat van de Noord-Nederlandse Economie (The State of the Economy of the Northern...

It is with great sadness that we received news on the passing away of our good friend and colleague Eddy (Adam) Szirmai. Eddy was one the co-founders of the GGDC in 1994. He has been crucial in bringing together a group of dedicated scholars on the topic...

Branko Milanovic has been appointed as the third holder of the Maddison Chair. In this role, he will be affiliated with the University of Groningen and regularly visit for research and teaching activities.

Marcel Timmer, director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre will be appointed as one of the three board members of the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis, CPB, starting September 1, 2019. In this position, he will jointly lead the...

The Socio-Economic Council of the Northern Netherlands, SER-NN, organized a meeting on November 26 about the possible impact of Brexit on three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. Bart Los gave a talk and participated in a panel with representatives...

On March 6, Robert Inklaar gave his inaugural lecture to officially accept his position of Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare. In this lecture, he established how productivity growth in the 21st century has been low by historical...

The research of Marianna Papakonstantinou is featured in Trouw (in Dutch): she finds that countries with greater emigration subsequently experience faster growth in knowledge-intensive industries. This implies that factors such as return migration,...

On July 1, Robert Inklaar was appointed Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare at the University of Groningen. The main research objective of this new chair is to better understand how automation will affect not just economic activity, but...

Gaaitzen de Vries has been appointed special term Research Professor of Global Value Chains at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. The centre in which he participates is dedicated to research activities on the development of...

Marcel Timmer and Bart Los are contributors to two of the 25 winning consortia that will conduct research on the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union for the British ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council). Timmer will...

The Transatlantic Platform has awarded a Digging into Data grant of €375,000 to an international team of researchers, with the team for the Netherlands led by Robert Inklaar and also including Marcel Timmer. The grant is awarded for a project to use online...

Wen Chen, Reitze Gouma and Marcel Timmer have prepared two reports as background for the upcoming World Intellectual Property Report 2017. The reports aim to measure the importance of intangible assets in global value chains. They were presented on March...

Robert Inklaar lectures today at the European Investment Bank about Inequality and GDP. He will argue that our understanding of income differences across countries depends crucially on accurate and frequent comparisons of prices across countries as...

Jutta Bolt has been named as one of the 29 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows for 2016. This prestigious Swedish research grant by the Wallenberg Foundation of approximately €1mln will allow Jutta Bolt to devote more time to her research, in part at Lund...

On June 30, Wen Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Intangible capital and economic growth. He continues his research career in Groningen as a postdoc on Marcel Timmer's Vici project.

Can we still classify an entire industry as technology intensive? At a workshop of the US National Science Foundation, Bart Los argued that this is an outdated perspective in a time when electronics manufacturing in one country may involve the development...

Robert Inklaar has won the WF Duisenberg Fellowship Prize, awarded every two years to the best young applied macroeconomist in the Netherlands. The jury praised his publication record and contribution to policy debates. On receiving the prize, he discussed...

Marcel Timmer was an advisor to the temporary committee of the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) on the measurement of welfare. The report of commission, titled "Welvaart in Kaart" (Mapping Welfare), is available here.

On Wednesday January 20, VNO-NCW and MKB-Nederland have organized 'De dag van de Industrie 2016' (the day of industry 2016) at the Nieuwspoort in the Hague. During that day, Gaaitzen de Vries will present the main outcomes from a report he and Marcel...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert meeting on the Dutch economy in Global Value Chains organized by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the recent report by De Vries and Timmer on the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for...

Gaaitzen de Vries and Marcel Timmer finished a report for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairsand VNO/NCW titled: “Dutch Manufacturing Competing in Global Value Chains”. The report stresses the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for the...

Reitze Gouma gave a presentation on the occasion of the launch of the FAO's new agricultural productivity database, indicating how incorporating measurement lessons from EU KLEMS would be beneficial.

Gaaitzen de Vries completed a consultancy report on ‘Global Value Chain Specialization Patterns of Sweden and Its Key Competitors’ for Tillväxtanalys (Stockholm, Sweden). The analysis shows that Austria and the Netherlands are emerging as key competitors...

Robert Inklaar presented research-in-progress with Jutta Bolt at a World Bank meeting. The main question is whether the World Bank's approach to measuring global poverty does adequate justice to cross-country differences and whether a new method for...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert seminar organised by the European Commission's DG EMPL and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on structural change.

The VICI project "Modelling Global Value Chains, a new framework to study trade, jobs and income inequality in an interdependent world" has started. This 5-year project involving a team of PhD students and post docs is led by Marcel Timmer and funded by...

Four new hires will strengthen the GGDC: PhD students Stefan Pahl and Aobo Jiang, and post docs Laurie Reijnders and Wen Chen.