A former Brussels Correspondent of the Financial Times, Giles Merrit is a journalist, author and broadcaster who has specialised in the study and analysis of European public policy issues since 1978.

Since 1984, Merritt has been a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and Project Syndicate and his articles range widely across EU political and economic issues. Merritt began his newspaper career in 1968, when he joined the Financial Times. From 1972 he was successively FT staff correspondent in Paris, Dublin/Belfast and Brussels, until leaving the newspaper in 1983. In 1982 he published “World Out of Work”, an award-winning assessment of the unemployment crisis in industrialised countries, and in 1991 “Eastern Europe & the USSR: The Challenge of Freedom”, published in four languages.