In this seminar Professor Vines discusses the kind of leadership in global macroeconomic policy-making that China might provide. Professor Vines describes a form of leadership, which he calls ‘concerted unilateralism’, that enables countries to pursue their own objectives, in a way which they would not have been able to do if they were acting on their own, and enables them to achieve a higher level of welfare. He contrasts such leadership with a form of authoritarian leadership in which the leader imposes obligations on other countries which are to the disadvantage of those countries. He argues that China could provide leadership of the first kind, by making use of the G20 Mutual Assessment Process, or G20MAP. In the short term, Professor Vines believes that China might do this by consolidating the ‘2-in-5’ action plan, which Australia instituted within the G20MAP when Australia was President of the G20. In the longer term, China might do this by ensuring that there is convergence between the G20MAP and China’s own One-Belt-One-Road strategy for international engagement in trade and finance.

David Vines is a Professor of Economics, and a Fellow of Balliol College, at Oxford University, where he is also Acting Director of the Political Economy of Financial Markets Programme at St Anthony’s College and Director of the Ethics and Economics Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in the Oxford Martin School. In addition he is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.

David’s research is on macroeconomics, finance, and global economic governance; he has published many papers and books on these subjects. His initial work was with the Nobel-Prize winner James Meade in Cambridge; together they published some of the earliest research on inflation-targeting regimes. He is currently working on the restoration of trust in the financial system, on the future of the European Monetary Union, and on the role of the International Monetary Fund in ensuring international macroeconomic cooperation. He teaches macroeconomics, international economics and development economics to both graduate students and undergraduates at Oxford University.

The CAMA Macroeconomics Brown Bag Seminars offer CAMA speakers, in particular PhD students, an opportunity to present their work in progress in front of their peers, and reputable visitors to showcase their work.