WING THYE WOO

Wing Thye Woo is Professor in the Department of Economics, University of California at Davis. He is also the Special Advisor for East Asian Economies in the Millennium Project of the United Nations (one of the goals is to half the absolute poverty rate by 2015), and Visiting Researcher at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. He is the Director of the East Asia Program within the Center for Globalisation and Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Wing Thye Woo's current research focuses on international financial architecture, economic growth, exchange rate economics, and the economic issues of East Asia (particularly China and Indonesia). He has published over 90 articles in professional economic journals and books on topics like exchange rate economics, current account determination, technological innovation and competitiveness, economic management in Indonesia and Malaysia, and competing interpretations of China's growth mechanisms; co-authored books on Indonesia and China; and edited volumes and special issues of journals on cross-country experiences with financial crisis, and economic transition. His article "The Monetary Approach to Exchange Rate Determination under Rational Expectations: The Dollar-Deutschemark Case," Journal of International Economics (JIE) February 1985, was identified by JIE in 2000 to be one of the twenty-fivemost cited articles in its 30 years of history.

From 2000-2002, Wing Thye Woo was the Director of the East Asia Program at the Center for International Development, Harvard University. He originated and realised the idea of establishing an Asian Economic Panel (AEP) as a joint venture of Harvard University, Keio University, and the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. AEP is a forum of about 50 leading specialists on Asian economies that meets twice a year to discuss economic issues that are of particular importance to Asia. The discussions in each meeting are organised around 9 analytical papers. Selected papers from the meetings are published in the new journal Asian Economic Papers (of which Wing Thye Woo is the editor), MIT Press.

In 1998, Wing Thye Woo headed the project “Asia Competitiveness Report 1999” to analyse the Asian financial crisis for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, February 1999. The updated report was published as The Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons for a Resilient Asia, MIT Press, 2000. He also directed the Harvard Institute for International Development project “China’s Integration into the World Economy” (1997-98); and a part of that report was published as “Discrepancies in International Data: An Application to China-Hong Kong Entrepot Trade,” in American Economic Review, May 1999.

From 1994-96, Wing Thye Woo led an international team (which included Leszek Balcerowicz, Boris Fedorov, and Jeffrey D. Sachs) to study the reform experiences of centrally-planned economies. The findings of this cross-country study were disseminated in high-level conferences in Prague, Beijing, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Ulan Bator and Washington D.C. This report was published by MIT Press as Economies in Transition: Comparing Asia and Europe, 1997.

Wing Thye Woo has advised a number of governments on macroeconomic and exchange rate management, state enterprise restructuring, trade issues, and financial sector development. He was a member of Consultant Team to China's Ministry of Finance that helped to design the tax and exchange rate reforms implemented in January 1994; and the report has been published by Oxford University Press as Fiscal Management and Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China, 1995. During 1997-1998, Wing Thye Woo served as a special advisor to the U.S.Treasury. Wing Thye Woo has held visiting positions (of longer than a month) at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore), Center for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia), London School of Economics, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Developpement International (CERDI) at Universite d'Auvergne (France), East-West Center (Hawaii), International Monetary Fund, University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, and People's University of China.

He has also served as external reviewer for Lingnan University (Hong Kong), Chinese University of Hong Kong, and National University of Singapore, and as external examiner for master and doctoral dissertations submitted to University of Colorado, Australian National University, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Universite Toulouse I, and University of Hong Kong.

Wing Thye Woo is presently Editor of Asian Economic Papers and Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, and Associate Editor of Economics of Planning. He is also a member of the editorial advisory boards of Journal of Asian Business, ASEAN Economic Bulletin, Pacific Economic Review, Journal of International Economics and Economic Policy, and China Economic Review. He was President of the Chinese Economists Association of North America

(2001-2002), and Vice-President of the Chinese Economists Society (2000-2001, and 2002-2003).

Wing Thye Woo was born in 1954 in Penang, Malaysia, where he was a member of the 2nd.Georgetown (S) Senior Scout Troop, out of Methodist Boys' School. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1976 with a B.A. (High Honors) in Economics, and a B.S. in Engineering. Wing Thye Woo received an M.A. in Economics from Yale in 1978, and an M.A.and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1982. He joined the University of California in Davis in 1985, and, before that, he was a Research Associate at the Brookings Institution.