A Professional Practitioner Approach in Macroeconomics: Bridging the Gaps Between Academia and Professional Economics

The chapter makes the case for adopting a professional-practitioner approach to the teaching and assessment of macroeconomics. Drawing on my own experiences as both a professional and academic economist I discuss the benefits of doing so. These include mitigating the perpetuation of the “hard bias” that arises from academic economics in the training of our macroeconomists, creating a more inclusive curriculum and learning environment, and closing employability gaps identified by employers of economists. To facilitate more widely that adoption of the professional-practitioner approach I recommend the use of a professional competency framework borrowing from the competencies that are assessed at economic assessment centres run by the Government Economic Service. The competencies of subject knowledge, application and communication give rise to a framework that I label as the Kn-A-C framework. I discuss how this can be implemented, with a particular focus on what it means for the curriculum and assessment.