The Cobden Centre’s executive team and Senior Fellows. Our Advisory Board may be found here.
Toby Baxendale
Chairman
Toby Baxendale is an entrepreneur who owns a company which is Britain’s largest fresh fish supplier to the catering trade. He also has active interests in several charities and is a Magistrate and an Ironman triathlete.
Toby is also dedicated to furthering the teaching of the Austrian School of Economics and the revival of the Great Manchester School of Cobden and Bright. Concerning the former he has helped with its revival at the London School of Economics.
His business can be found at:
His charity interests can be found at:
- Cobden Centre: www.cobdencentre.org
- Opportunity Trust: www.opportunity.org
Dr. Tim Evans
Chief Executive
Dr. Tim Evans is the Chief Executive of the Cobden Centre. A former President and Director General of the Centre for the New Europe (2002-2005) in Brussels, between 1993 and early 2002 he was the Executive Director of Public Affairs at the Independent Healthcare Association in London where he oversaw the political affairs and public relations of the UK’s independent health and social care providers. In this role he was widely credited as being the major driving force behind the ‘2000 Concordat’ which was described by the Financial Times as the most “historic deal in 50 years of British healthcare”.
Prior to that, in 1991-1992, he was the Chief Economic and Political Adviser to the Slovak Prime Minister – Dr. Jan Carnogursky – and was Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit. In the late 1980s he was the Assistant Director of the Foundation for Defence Studies and subsequently became a Senior Policy Consultant at the Adam Smith Institute.
Today, as well as working with the Cobden Centre, he is the Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd, a Consultant Director and a Senior Fellow with the Adam Smith Institute and the President of the Libertarian Alliance.
In 1993, he was awarded his PhD from the London School of Economics. A political sociologist specialising in economics, he has taught at a number of academic institutions over the years including teaching post-graduate students Social Policy at London’s Guildhall University and the Economics and Politics of the Future on the Strategic Command Course of Britain’s national Police Staff College at Bramshill. Since 2007 he has been a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
A regular commentator on television and radio, his articles have appeared in the Guardian, Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal Europe and a host of other newspapers around the world. The author of numerous books, monographs and articles he has been published by think tanks that include the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for the New Europe, Fabian Society, Institute of Economic Affairs, Fraser Institute, Libertarian Alliance, Heritage Foundation, and the Independent Healthcare Association. Today, he lives in London with his wife Helen, daughter Petica and three cats – Basil, Freddie and Douglas.
Steven Baker
Corporate Affairs Director
Steve is a professional engineer, manager and businessman, in aerospace and in business software. He has worked with a wide range of organisations globally, from the armed forces and manufacturers, to banks, regulators, government departments and software firms of all sizes.
He began studying economics in 1999 when trying to understand the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom, the bursting of the bubble, and the response of central bankers. Steven’s primary interest is executing the Centre’s vision in practice.
Steve is privileged and honoured to be the Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Wycombe. He is also an Associate Consultant to the Centre for Social Justice.
You can find out more about Steve at his personal and political website: www.stevebaker.info.
Dr. Anthony J. Evans
Founding Fellow
Anthony J. Evans (B.A., Liverpool; M.A., George Mason; PhD., George Mason) is Assistant Professor of Economics at ESCP Europe. He is the co-author of The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in the Transition from Communism.
He has been published in journals such as The Review of Austrian Economics, Eastern European Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Economic Affairs and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has featured in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He has written numerous trade journal articles and pens opinion editorials for Guardian Unlimited. He has also authored policy papers for the Conservative Party, European Investment Fund, Financial Reporting Council and the Competition Commission on a range of market-process issues. Evans lives in Hertfordshire with his wife.
Professor Gabriel Calzada
Senior Fellow
Professor Gabriel Calzada is Associate Professor of Economics at the King Juan Carlos University in Spain and a Founder-President of the libertarian think tank Instituto Juan de Mariana. He is also Vice-Director of the Austrian School-oriented and scholarly Procesos de Marcado. He has been a Rowley Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Centre for the New Europe. He ia a frequent broadcaster on television and has written extensively for such publications as Libertad Digital, Spanish Herald, Expansion, Mises Daily, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Procesos de Mercados, La Ilustracion Liberal, and Canarias Liberal.
Professor Kevin Dowd
Senior Fellow
Professor Kevin Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the Cobden Centre and a long-standing free market economist whose main work has been on free banking and unregulated monetary systems. Over the years, he has written extensively on the history and theory of free banking, the mechanics of monetary systems without the state and the failings of central banking and financial regulation.
His books on these subjects include Private Money: The Path to Monetary Stability (IEA, 1988), The State and the Monetary System (Philip Allan, 1989), Competition and Finance: A New Interpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics (Macmillan, 1996) and Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking (Routledge, 2000). He has current or past affiliations with the CATO Institute (Washington), the Independent Institute (Oakland, CA), the Open Republic Institute (Dublin), the Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST), the Institute of Economic Affairs (London) and the Pensions Institute (London), as well as with the Libertarian Alliance (London).
Over the last ten years or so, he has worked primarily on financial risk, pensions and insurance, and has recently worked on a book concerning the current financial crisis and the lessons to be drawn from it. Up until recently he held the chair in financial risk management at Nottingham University Business School, where worked in the Centre for Risk and Insurance Studies.
He lives in Sheffield with his wife and their two daughters.
Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto
Senior Fellow
Jesús Huerta de Soto, professor of economics at the Complutense University of Madrid, is Spain’s leading Austrian economist. As an author, translator, publisher, and teacher, he also ranks among the world’s most active ambassadors for classical liberalism.
He is the author of Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles.
Dr. Paul Dragos Aligica
Senior Fellow
Dr. Aligica earned his PhD in political science from Indiana University, Bloomington. He also earned a PhD in economics from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest and a PhD in sociology from the University of Bucharest.
His newest book, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School (Routledge, London), co-authored with Peter Boettke, examines the work of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Elinor Ostrom. His previous books include The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in Transition, with Anthony Evans (Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2009) and Prophecies of Doom, Scenarios of Progress (Continuum Publishers, London, 2007). He has published in journals such as Comparative Strategy, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Revue française d’economie, Public Organization Review, Communist and Post Communist Studies, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Global Business & Economics Review, East European Economics, International Journal of Business and Globalization, East European Politics and Societies, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
In addition to his academic work, he has served as an expert to large international consulting firms and as an advisor or project partner to institutions such as the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, European Union organizations, and the United States Agency for International Development.
Dr. Cecile Philippe
Senior Fellow
Cécile Philippe holds a doctorate in economics and a Diploma in Advanced Studies in business management in developing countries from the University of Paris-IX Dauphine, (having graduated from the Aix Marseille III University). At the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Auburn University centre in the USA, she completed her thesis on information theories and the emergence of an online market in information.
Cécile founded the Institut économique Molinari in 2003 and remains its president. She is the author of numerous newspaper articles published in French as well as in English. In 2007, her first book, titled “C’est trop tard pour la terre” (“It’s too late for the earth”), was published by Éditions JC Lattès. The book deals with environmental policy and seeks to put an end to various myths, including the notion that regulation and taxation go hand in hand with environmental improvement. She has been interviewed many times on public policy matters in the French media, and has published op-ed articles in several French-speaking countries.
Dr. Richard Wellings
Senior Fellow
Dr. Richard Wellings is the Deputy Editorial Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He is deputy editor of the journal Economic Affairs and works on the production of the IEA’s monograph series. Richard is the editor of the IEA blog and the author of several papers and reports examining economic policy issues from a free-market perspective.
You can read some of Richard’s work at the IEA here.
The Institute of Economic Affairs’ publications are available here.
Francisco Capella
Senior Fellow
Francisco Capella graduated in physics (astrophysics, Complutense University in Madrid) and did postgraduate studies on astrophysics (Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute and La Laguna University) and on artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering (Computer Science Department of the Polytechnical University in Madrid); he has a masters degree in Austrian economics from Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, and he is currently working on a PhD thesis on the ethics of freedom and the politics of anarchocapitalism. He is a founding member of the Instituto Juan de Mariana where he directs its Science and Ethics department. He is and independent thinker responsible for the Intelligence and Freedom project (intelib.com), where he resarches issues on philosophy, biological and cultural evolution, cognitive science, epistemology, economics, theoretical and applied ethics and the theory of freedom.
He regularly writes articles for Instituto Juan de Mariana, Libertad Digital and his blog.
Tom Clougherty
Senior Fellow
As well as being a senior fellow at the Cobden Centre, Tom Clougherty is Executive Director of the free market Adam Smith Institute. In addition to being responsible for the Institute’s overall performance, Tom oversees their policy research and external relations, frequently representing the Institute in the press and media.
Before joining the ASI, Tom was Research Director at the Globalisation Institute, where he focused on international development issues, including microfinance and water privatization, and environmental policy. Tom has a degree in law (and a blue in golf) from the University of Cambridge.
You can find out more about Tom’s work at the Adam Smith Institute.