Washington Post Albie Award for Lukas Linsi

Lukas Linsi (ICOG) and Daniel Mügge (UvA) have received an Albie Award for their article "Globalization and the growing defects of international economic statistics," which appeared in the Review of International Political Economy. The annual award, named after renowned social scientist Albert O. Hirschman, is given to the 'best work in political economy published in the previous year... that has made us rethink how the world works in such a way that we will never be able to “unthink” the argument.'

Linsi and Mügge receive this award for debunking the common assumption that "official international economic statistics are ... accurate and meaningful gauges of cross-border flows of trade and capital," and that "the quality of the underlying data keeps improving over time." Rather, they discovered that "reported figures are far less accurate than they are typically imagined to be and often do not correspond to the theoretical concepts with which users associate them. At the same time, measurement quality deteriorates over time as the transnationalization of economic production gradually undermines the validity of BOP statistics." This has serious implications for the widespread use of these numbers, and has thereby earned the authors a place among the 2020 Albie Award Winners.

Read about all the 2020 Albie winners at the Washington Post.