Director, Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy

Professor of Regional and Applied Economics, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Professor McCombie is the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, and Professor of Regional and Applied Economics in Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He has previously held positions as a Specialist Advisor in the House of Lords, on the European Union Committee Inquiry into the EU Structural and Cohesion Funds, and as an Economic Consultant to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

His research is largely concerned with understanding why countries and regions differ in terms of their economic and productivity growth rates. His early research was on the theoretical elaboration and statistical testing of the "Verdoorn law". This empirical relationship between industrial productivity and manufacturing growth was first given prominence by the late Lord Kaldor. This relationship provided evidence of the importance of increasing returns to scale in economic growth. Subsequent research concentrated on the role of the balance of payments in constraining the rate of economic growth.

He is presently engaged in work that is essentially a critique of the neoclassical approach to measuring the rate of technical change. It involves an examination of the foundations of the aggregate production function, including issues raised in the Capital Theory Capital Controversies, aggregation problems and, in particular, the insurmountable problems posed by the use of value data and the presence of an accounting identity for the estimations of putative aggregate production functions.

Professor McCombie is also a Fellow in economics and Tutor at Downing College.