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Leaders and institutions: honouring Jean Pisani-Ferry and celebrating the birth of Bruegel

Publishing date
27 January 2025
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jeromin zettelmeyer

On 17 January 2005, Bruegel held its first board meeting, chaired by Mario Monti. Among the agenda items was the adoption of the Bruegel name. This was Monti’s idea – a conflation of Brussels, European Global, Economic and Laboratory, and a nod to the great Flemish painter. It also appointed our first director, Jean Pisani- Ferry, who led Bruegel until handing over to Guntram Wolff in 2013.

On 17 January 2025 – last Friday – we celebrated Bruegel’s 20th birthday as think tankers would: with a conference on global policymaking in the Trump-Xi era, focused on the seismic changes in global economics and politics in recent years, and the question – answered in a new book by Jean with George Papaconstantinou – of whether and how this new environment allows for global cooperation.

Apart from helping us to get our heads around this question, Friday’s event served three purposes. It was a reunion, bringing back early staff members including all of the original research team – Alan Ahearne, Juan Delgado, André Sapir, Jakob von Weizsäcker and of course Nicolas Véron, Bruegel’s co-creator – and many of the policymakers and civil servants who were instrumental in Bruegel’s creation. It celebrated the institution. And it honoured the original leader, Jean.

Economists tend to believe that institutions, rather than leaders, matter. They exaggerate their point. Leaders can matter independently of institutions. Leaders can degrade and even destroy institutions – as may be happening today in the world’s most-powerful democracy. But the most meaningful, impactful way in which leaders matter is through their creation of successful institutions. Jean is such a leader.

In a speech at the National Bank of Belgium on the eve of our anniversary, Jean described why, in his view, Bruegel has succeeded as an institution. He mentioned five factors: ambition, audacity, integrity, quality and luck. Of these, integrity is surely the most important. Luck cannot be counted on; ambition and audacity can have ups and downs; quality is hugely important, but there will be the occasional lapse. Integrity is the one area where we can never afford to underperform. It is the source of our independence, which is in turn the source of our credibility. This is why Bruegel’s governance focuses on securing integrity.

As Bruegel’s current director, I am grateful to Jean for the institution I have inherited. All I need to do is ensure that we continue to meet the standard of ambition, audacity, integrity and quality set in Bruegel’s first years. Then, the luck will follow.

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About the authors

  • Jeromin Zettelmeyer

    Jeromin Zettelmeyer has been Director of Bruegel since September 2022. Born in Madrid in 1964, Jeromin was previously a Deputy Director of the Strategy and Policy Review Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to that, he was Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow (2019) and Senior Fellow (2016-19) at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Director-General for Economic Policy at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (2014-16); Director of Research and Deputy Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (2008-2014), and an IMF staff member, where he worked in the Research, Western Hemisphere, and European II Departments (1994-2008).

    Jeromin holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT (1995) and an economics degree from the University of Bonn (1990). He is a Research Fellow in the International Macroeconomics Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and a member of the CEPR’s Research and Policy Network on European economic architecture, which he helped found. He is also a member of CESIfo. He has published widely on topics including financial crises, sovereign debt, economic growth, transition to market, and Europe’s monetary union. His recent research interests include EMU economic architecture, sovereign debt, debt and climate, and the return of economic nationalism in advanced and emerging market countries.    

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