Richard Davies

Richard Davies is an economist based in London. He is currently Chief of Staff at the Growth Commission being run by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and a visiting fellow at University College London. Before this he held various roles in economic policy, research, journalism and the voluntary sector.

Between 2015 and 2016 he was economics advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne at HM Treasury. Other policy roles include working at the Bank of England between 2006 and 2012, where he managed teams covering international macroeconomics and the financial sector. He was a lead author of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report. He also worked on secondment at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. He began his career as a microeconomist, working in private-sector consultancy, and then as a government antitrust economist at the UK Competition Commission.

Richard’s research has been published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking and the Journal of Financial Stability, and he previously held a lectureship at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he taught macroeconomics, and money and banking. He studied economics at Oxford and the London School of Economics.

As a journalist Richard has written for The Economist (where he was economics editor until 2015), The Times and 1843 Magazine. He edited a book on economics — Making Sense of the Modern Economy — published by Profile in 2015.

Richard volunteers for a number of economics-related charities. He is a director of CORE Economics Education, and gives talks about economics and journalism in state schools for Speakers for Schools. He has previously worked with Pro Bono Economics to help charities estimate the impact of their work. Richard’s book Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future was published by in 2019.