Swati Dhingra to join Bank of England’s monetary policy committee

theguardian.com:

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has chosen an outspoken critic of Brexit as the next member of the Bank of England’s interest rate-setting committee.

Dr Swati Dhingra, an associate professor at the London School of Economics who has previously called on the government to “cancel Brexit”, will join the monetary policy committee (MPC) in August, arriving during one of the most difficult periods faced by the central bank.

An Indian-born academic who gained a PhD in the US before moving to the UK, Dhingra will join just as inflation is expected to be heading above 10% and the economy could be sliding into recession.

The first Asian woman to be appointed to the role, her arrival means one-third of the nine-strong policymaking group are women, for the first time since 2005. That number has never been surpassed, leaving the Bank some way short of gender parity.

Dhingra and her colleagues at LSE have tracked the relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours since the 2016 Brexit vote and in successive reports found the economic damage to be considerable.

Before the parliamentary vote in December 2019 to leave the EU single market and customs union, Dhingra wrote with a colleague in LSE’s Brexit Economics series: “From an economic perspective, the best policy would be to cancel Brexit.”

With Tory MPs and cabinet members bristling at claims that much of the UK’s inflation increase can be blamed on Brexit’s negative impact on trade and immigration, her appointment is likely to prove controversial.

Her broader research into the UK’s trade links with China and the far east and US means she will bring a wealth of expertise about Britain’s challenges as it searches for new export markets.

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