Marcel Timmer

Marcel Timmer is a professor at the University of Groningen and a value chain expert at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC).

He is currently leading the large research programme Modelling Global Value Chains: A New Framework to Study Trade, Jobs and Income Inequality in an Interdependent World, funded by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO, VICI scheme, 2015–20). This is building on major international research projects funded by the European Commission services (FP6 and FP7), which he co-led.

These include the EU KLEMS project, comparing patterns of growth in the European Union, Japan and the US (2003–08) and the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) project (2009–12). The WIOD has developed new databases, accounting frameworks and models to increase understanding of the socioeconomic and environmental consequences of increasing global integration.

Marcel has been a consultant and advisor for various organizations, including the OECD, the World Bank, Japanese Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry (METI), Asian Development Bank and Statistics Netherlands.

He is the lead author of the book Economic Growth in Europe published by Cambridge University Press, and has extensively published in national and international journals, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, Economic Policy, and the Journal of Economic History.

Professor Timmer is part of UNU-WIDER’s project on the Economic Transformation Database. He is involved in researching patterns and causes of structural transformation in developing countries, and the development of the Economic Transformation Database, the successor of the GGDC 10-sector database.