Brief Bio

"Economists hitherto have tried hard enough and often enough to change the world, the real difficulty however is to understand it."

"In a world where expectations are (nearly) everything, to change our understanding is already to change our reality. Not only that, changing things this way is the most plausible, most cost effective and least destructive way of doing so" Read more........

Born in Liverpool Edward Hugh is a macroeconomist of British origin who has lived in Catalonia for over 25 years. For 20 of those years he lived and worked in Barcelona, but since 2010 he has been living in a small village near the Costa Brava town of Figueres.

Hugh, who studied economics at the LSE in the late sixties before going on to do Masters and Doctoral studies in Manchester, is an expert on the impact of demographic change and migratory processes on economic growth.

His work came to the attention of a wider international public following the publication of a New York Times article highlighting his blogging activity and his anticipation of the Euro Area crisis.

Since the start of the crisis Hugh has been a reference point for the international press in relation to the difficult economic situation in Spain.

While in recent years he has diversified his writing activity he continues to be an active blogger, making regular and widely followed contributions to social network platforms like Twitter and Facebook. He has no party political affiliation or ideological attachment of any kind, and is proud of his reputation for outspoken politically-incorrect independent analysis. Apart from his writing and speaking activities Hugh is often sought out by investors for opinions on the issues of the day, in particular those relating to demographic patterns and Europe in general.

During the period between October 2010 (following the initial FROB intervention) and January 2013 (when the bank recapitalization was carried out) he was a board member of the bank Catalunya Caixa.

He has recently published a book on the Spanish economy (¿Adios a la crisis?, Deusto, 2014), one on Japan's economic crisis (The A-B-E of Economics, Create Space, 2014) and most recently "Is the Euro Crisis Really Over?" (Create Space, March 2015) He is a frequent contributor to the Catalan press and defends Catalonia's right to decide its own future. He has often been an informal adviser to the Catalan President Artur Mas on economic issues.

He is currently working on his next book - No Growth Societies - which will be written and published in English.

He is also a regular speaker and participant in Forums and Economic Seminars, within and without Spain, a vocation which has taken him across Europe and the Middle East, from Brussels and Vienna, to Riga and Bergen, to Doha and Tel Aviv.