The Unassuming Economist

From a VoxEU post by Beatrice Weder di Mauro:

“VoxEU launched in June 2007 with a simple but ambitious idea: that rigorous economics could speak clearly, quickly, and accessibly to the world’s most urgent policy debates. As its founding Editor-in-Chief Richard Baldwin steps down, this column marks this moment with thanks for his vision, his energy, and his service to the economics profession and to the public.

President Centre for Economic Policy Research; President Professor of Global Economics, Climate and Nature Finance Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID); Visiting Professor Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society INSEAD

When VoxEU launched in June 2007, it was an experiment with a simple but ambitious idea: that rigorous economics could speak clearly, quickly, and accessibly to the world’s most urgent policy debates. It was Richard Baldwin’s idea, and it has become one of the most influential innovations in the global economics community. As Richard steps down as Editor-in-Chief at the end of this year, we want to mark this moment with deep thanks for his vision, his energy, and his extraordinary service to the profession and to the public. 

VoxEU did not appear by accident. It was born from Richard’s conviction that economics needed a better bridge between frontier research and real-time events. Academic publication is necessarily careful and slow. Policy, by contrast, is fast, noisy, and often hungry for evidence. Richard saw that this gap was not a small inconvenience but a structural weakness in how societies use knowledge. VoxEU was his answer: a place where economists could contribute analysis at the speed of the news cycle, without sacrificing the discipline and integrity of scholarly standards.

From the outset, Richard insisted on two things that became VoxEU’s hallmark. First, intellectual seriousness: VoxEU would be a platform for evidence, not opinion for its own sake. Second, lucid communication: authors would be encouraged to write for a broad, global readership encompassing policymakers, journalists, practitioners, and fellow scholars. These principles may sound straightforward, but anyone who has tried to follow them at scale knows how rare that combination is. Maintaining them for eighteen years has required editorial judgement, perseverance, and a founder’s willingness to do the unglamorous work, day after day.

Over time, VoxEU has grown into a remarkable global public good. Thousands of columns have presented new research, debated policy trade-offs, and translated complex ideas into usable insight. Its reach is international and genuinely pluralistic, spanning every continent and most subfields of economics. It has become a first stop for people trying to understand what economists know (and what they disagree about) in the face of fast-moving events.”

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