Diane Coyle

Economist, author and managing director of the consultancy Enlightenment Economics

Economist and author Diane Coyle runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. She is Vice Chair of the BBC Trust. She is a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, was a member of the Browne Review of higher education funding, and was on the Competition Commission for eight years. She is also a visiting professor at the University of Manchester.

Coyle specialises in competition policy, network markets, the economics of new technologies and globalisation, including extensive work on the impacts of mobile telephony in developing countries.

She is the author of several bestselling books. The latest is The Economics of Enough (March 2011), the previous one The Soulful Science (2007). Her first book was The Weightless World (1996), one of the very first to identify the impact of new technologies on the economy and society. Others include Sex, Drugs and Economics (2002), Paradoxes of Prosperity (2001), and Governing the World Economy (2000), all translated into many languages. She has also published numerous book chapters, reports and articles, and was formerly a regular presenter on BBC Radio 4's Analysis.

Coyle was previously Economics Editor of The Independent and before that worked at the Treasury and in the private sector as an economist. She has a PhD in economics from Harvard. Diane was awarded an OBE in January 2009.