Dr Steve Coulter


Guest Teacher in European Political Economy at the European Institute

Steve Coulter

Steve Coulter is Head of Industrial Strategy, Skills and Sustainability at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He previously taught political economy at the EI for five years, and continues to teach EU425, 'Interest Representation and Economic Policy-making' to MSc students. 

Prior to that, he was a business and economics journalist for newspapers and BBC News, latterly as the BBC's Senior Economics Analyst working on coverage of the financial and eurozone crises. Steve has also held academic posts at City University and the Clore Management department at Birkbeck, University of London. He has also worked for the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels and was Associate Fellow of the Social Market Foundation think tank.   

He was educated at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he received his PhD in European Political Economy for a thesis on the political economy of labour market reform.

His main research interests are: Varieties of Capitalism; Industrial Policy; Political Economy; Impact of Digitalisation on Labour Markets; Trade Unions;  the New Economy.

He has written extensively on European and UK economic and labour market policies and is the author of ‘New Labour, Industrial Relations and the Trade Unions’ (Palgrave 2014), and ‘Everyday Economics: A User’s Guide to the Modern Economy’ (Agenda 2017). He is currently writing a book on the comparative political economy of industrial policy for publication in 2020.


Expertise: Labour Markets; Industrial Strategy; Skills; Sustainability; Varieties of Capitalism