Professor George Yarrow

George is a graduate of St John’s College Cambridge and, after spells at the Universities of Warwick and Newcastle, arrived at Hertford in 1978 as a Tutorial Fellow in Economics, working alongside one of the great servants of the College in recent decades, Roger Van Noorden. In 1991, with the support of the then Principal of the College, Professor Sir Christopher Zeeman, he founded the Regulatory Policy Institute, an institution dedicated to bringing together academics, civil servants, business leaders, practising lawyers and others to discuss and analyse major, enduring challenges in micro-economic policy. Its flagship series of events, the ‘Hertford Seminars in Regulation’, has run ever since.

George’s research interests at Hertford centred on intertwined issues surrounding privatization, regulation/deregulation, and competition/liberalisation, with a particular emphasis on energy policy, although earlier and later work covered areas such as monetary policy, business behaviour, environmental policy, and welfare reform. His most widely known book, ‘Privatization: An Economic Analysis’, written jointly with Professor Sir John Vickers, has been published in Chinese and Spanish editions. He was an economic advisor to the energy regulators Ofgas and Ofgem from 1994 to 2006, and a Member of the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority from 2006 to 2009. In the subsequent decade he undertook a range of policy assessment tasks for the Governments of Australia and New Zealand.