Anubhav on... Macroeconomics

As avid readers of my blog would know, I’ve been working on the competition economics project for a few months now. In the interest of ensuring the diversity of my experience, I was asked to work on something entirely different. Moving on from the exciting world of competition economics, I dabbled with some macroeconomics this month.

We were working on a project in the health sector. Our clients wanted to know what would happen to the UK economy if a pandemic broke out. Initially, we thought this question was very open-ended, and it would be difficult to answer it with any measure of objectivity.

The trick with a question as open as this was to reduce it to something tractable and something we could relate to. We simplified the question into three simpler questions:

What happens when a pandemic hits the economy? Do families and companies change their behaviours? What does the government do?

How did these behaviours influence the economy in the past? To what extent will they continue to hold true?

We then put our heads together to tackle the answers. Once we had answered these questions, we could stitch the answers together and provide a very informed, objective, and quantitative view on the impact of a pandemic in the future.

Were our clients impressed?  I don’t know yet. We’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Fingers-crossed, and until next month,

Goodbye!