Alumnus Pieter Hasekamp, Director of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, is optimistic about the end of the corona crisis.
Philosopher Bas Haring calls the modellers of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis ‘engineers of societies’. He wrote an essay about and for the bureau, that celebrated its 75th anniversary on 29 October. The spirit of Jan Tinbergen, the first director of the bureau and the the first Nobel prize winner in economic sciences, remains sensible. Alumnus Pieter Hasekamp is following in the footsteps of the renowned Erasmus School of Economics’ professor, as director of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
‘I have never met him, but all Dutch economists are descendants of Tinbergen,’ says Hasekamp, referencing a book, written in the ‘90s. According to him Dutch economists like to rely on data and facts, just like Tinbergen. They are pragmatic and policy minded, not (purely) theoretically or ideologically. Just like the bureau. ‘So, in that way, this is still the inheritance of Tinbergen’, says Hasekamp. ‘If he could see now what the bureau has become, he would be proud’, his successor thinks.
Hasekamp took office at the start of the corona crisis and so far, he has mostly led the organisation from behind a computer screen. ‘I sometimes wonder whether the world behind the screen really exists’, he jokes in a column.
Read more about Pieter Hasekamp and his vision for the bureau here.
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Pieter Hasekamp studied Economics & Business Economics at Erasmus School of Economics and graduated in 1989.
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