MADRID 2019 The Future of AGEING

Nicholas Barr is Professor of Public Economics at the London School of Economics and the author of numerous articles, and author or editor of over twenty books, including The Economics of the Welfare State (5th edition, 2012) and Pension Reform: A Short Guide (with Peter Diamond) (2010, also in Chinese and Spanish). The heart of his work is an exploration of how market failures can both explain and justify the existence of welfare states. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Social Security Review and an Associate Editor of CESifo Economic Studies, the Australian Economic Review and the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

Alongside teaching and research is wide-ranging involvement in policy, including at the World Bank working the design of income transfers in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism, as Visiting Scholar at the IMF, and as member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils on Demographic Shifts and on Ageing Society.

Since the mid 1980s he has been active in the debate on financing higher education, advocating a system of tuition fees fully covered by income-contingent loans. He and his colleague Iain Crawford have been described as the architects of the 2006 reforms in England, and he led the team that designed the student loan system in Hungary.

He is also involved in pensions policy. He was a member of a small group invited to advise the government of China, presenting their findings to the Premier in 2004; and he and Peter Diamond presented a follow-up report in 2009. More recently, he was a member of a Presidential Commission on Reform of the Pension System in Chile. 

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