Interview

On the road to recovery

W
hat is the Grad­u­ate School of Eco­nom­ics?
The GSE was founded 10 years ago. It was a joint pro­ject be­tween the UAB and Pom­peu Fabra and two re­search cen­tres, CSIC and CREI. These were al­ready col­lab­o­rat­ing in re­search, but we or­gan­ised Mas­ters De­grees that are com­pletely in­ter­na­tional –80% of our stu­dents are from abroad and all our teach­ing is in Eng­lish. We offer Mas­ters in eco­nom­ics, fi­nance, pub­lic pol­icy, com­pe­ti­tion, and now also one in data sci­ence, which deals with Big Data. We get 220 to 250 stu­dents every year from all over the world. This year is the 10th an­niver­sary and I think in that time we have had stu­dents from al­most a hun­dred dif­fer­ent coun­tries.
What are the most pop­u­lar sub­jects?
We get stu­dents in­ter­ested in all the pro­grammes, from eco­nom­ics in gen­eral, where we give them a basis in how to analyse and un­der­stand what is going on in macro-eco­nom­ics, but we also have stu­dents who care more about pub­lic pol­icy, or in­ter­na­tional trade, for ex­am­ple, which is a very pop­u­lar pro­gramme. Other stu­dents come to bet­ter un­der­stand com­pe­ti­tion, while oth­ers come to do fi­nance, which has been ques­tioned in re­cent years, so you might think it's not so fash­ion­able but that's not the case as it has to over­come all of its dif­fi­cul­ties. And now we have stu­dents who are in­ter­ested in deal­ing with the huge amount of data avail­able. So there is in­ter­est in all fields of eco­nom­ics.
Are the sto­ries about eco­nomic re­cov­ery ac­tu­ally true?
I think there is some re­cov­ery but we have to be care­ful. We have been through a very deep re­ces­sion, and es­pe­cially here un­em­ploy­ment was huge. So, there are signs of re­cov­ery and the eas­i­est way to see it is that the em­ploy­ment rate has in­creased. It is still very high but it has im­proved. So that is one sign that things are a lit­tle bet­ter. Also, we are also see­ing that firms are ex­port­ing more. Ac­tu­ally, eco­nomic crises are seen –and here I need to be care­ful– as a bit of an op­por­tu­nity to clean up the econ­omy and change the way we do things. We don't want re­ces­sions and we should be able to change things with­out them but if we can't, and our coun­try is an ex­am­ple be­cause of the boom be­fore the re­ces­sion, in con­struc­tion for ex­am­ple, where we went down a path that eco­nomic agents we are not able to change, then some­thing hap­pens to force the change. It's un­for­tu­nate it has to be that way but it hap­pens all the time. We know the neg­a­tive things about re­ces­sions, the suf­fer­ing, and I'm not claim­ing they are good, but in some ways the re­ces­sion has been good for the econ­omy be­cause it has forced change.
Like when an ill­ness purges you and you feel bet­ter?
Ex­actly. A lot of firms had to close down but those firms that didn't have grown and are now very com­pet­i­tive. They are sell­ing abroad as much as they sell here, or more. They had to get their act to­gether, in eco­nomic terms, and get more pro­fes­sional man­age­ment, hire peo­ple with bet­ter ed­u­ca­tion, re­or­gan­ise the firm and look at other coun­tries. When you start sell­ing in an un­pro­tected mar­ket you don't know, you have to be clever, cre­ative and pro­duc­tive. So that's the good part of the cri­sis; the bad part we all know, and mainly comes down to un­em­ploy­ment.
Can we see some­thing like the Brexit vote as a re­sponse to the ef­fects of the cri­sis?
In the UK, the vote for Brexit is in­ter­est­ing in its com­po­si­tion, be­cause it was very ter­ri­to­ri­ally fo­cused but also in the age dis­tri­b­u­tion. Gen­er­al­is­ing, young peo­ple voted to re­main, while those who voted for Brexit were of a cer­tain age in areas that lacked op­por­tu­ni­ties and that were not grow­ing much. A lot of the peo­ple who wanted to stay were talk­ing from a part of the econ­omy that had op­por­tu­ni­ties, as op­posed to those on the other side who were some­what be­hind the scenes. We have to learn from this and also care about those peo­ple that are not tak­ing full ad­van­tage of all the nov­el­ties, new tech­nol­ogy and ed­u­ca­tion tak­ing place, be­cause those peo­ple are also part of the so­ci­ety and the econ­omy.
What about Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence. Is it fea­si­ble from an eco­nomic point of view?
If we went in­de­pen­dent right now, in a hun­dred years our coun­try would prob­a­bly be in good shape. If you look at Cat­alo­nia it­self, it is a coun­try of a size that could ab­solutely be in­de­pen­dent; it has every­thing it would need: good ed­u­ca­tion, re­sources. But I don't think we can avoid think­ing about the tran­si­tion to that and how it would hap­pen. If the split were a friendly agree­ment with the rest of Spain, like was tried in Scot­land, then we would be back on track in only a few years be­cause we have the means to do so. But the tran­si­tion won't be easy if it is seen as going against the larger coun­try we are part of. I think you have to eval­u­ate the con­se­quences and many peo­ple do not think about that tran­si­tion.
Teresa Garcia-Milà Every Monday at 7.20 pm, El Punt Avui TV's English Hour airs the interview series Going Native. This time Neil talks to Teresa Garcia-Milà, economist and head of the Graduate School of Economics.
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