Public Service

There can be few, if any, academic economists in Britain with such a long and distinguished record of public service as John Vickers, for which he received a knighthood in 2005. This began in the early 1990s, with memberships of panels for the European Commission, HM Treasury, Oftel, the Hansard Society, and the Department of Trade and Industry.

Before that, we have seen how he had nearly three years as Chief Economist of the Bank of England. He worked closely with Mervyn King, then Deputy Governor, and then Governor Eddie George. In this period, he served, among other bodies, on its Monetary Policy Committee which sets Bank Rate, its key policy instrument that influences all interest rates in sterling. From 2000 to 2005, after leaving the Bank, Vickers was head (first Director General, then Chair) of the OFT. Both his main academic area of interest, IO, and a subsid­iary one, monetary economics, were covered by these positions. The Chair of the Vickers Commission would crown his career of public service. It com­bined both of them.

The OFT headship occurred in a busy period. In the realm of publications, it switched Vickers' activity away from monetary economics to competition law. Two of his papers in this area appeared in 2003 and 2004, in the European Competition Law Review (Vickers 2003, 2004). Another was devoted to the economics of consumer law (Vickers 2005a). Two others followed a little later in the European Competition Journal (Vickers 2006, 2007), and sandwiched between, among other things, a 2005 Economic Journal paper on a core law- and-economics topic, market power abuse (Vickers 2005b). In 2010, the Economic Journal also published his Presidential Address to the RES, on prop­erty rights (Vickers 2010b). In the US, where Vickers has had links (with Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Chicago), law and economics are natural bedfellows. Law doctorates there are replete with economics, right to the gun­nels. But in Britain, alas, it is deplorably hard to study both subjects to a high level, let alone contribute to scholarship in both. Vickers shows how, with hard work, it can be done.

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