The Age of Equality

Richard Pomfret has been Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide since 1992.  From 1980 to 1991, he was Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, Bologna and Nanjing.  He previously worked at Concordia University in Montréal and the Institut für Weltwirtschaft at the University of Kiel in Germany. He has held visiting positions at universities in Canada, China, France, Italy and the USA, and in the first half of 2012 he is visiting the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna and at the University of Trento. 

He has acted as adviser to several international organizations.  In 1993 he was seconded to the United Nations for a year, acting as adviser on macroeconomic policy to the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.  In 1996 he spent six months at the OECD in Paris where he prepared a report on China’s role in the world economy. Current consultancy work includes projects for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the OECD.   

His research interests centre on economic development and international economics, and he has published over a hundred papers in these fields.  He has written nineteen books, including Investing in China 1979-1989; Ten Years of the Open Door Policy (1991), The Economics of Regional Trading Arrangements (1997; paperback edition 2001), Constructing a Market Economy: Diverse Paths from Central Planning in Asia and Europe (2002), The Central Asian Economies since Independence (2006), and textbooks on international trade and on development economics.  His most recent books are Regionalism in East Asia: Why has it flourished since 2000 and how far will it go? (World Scientific) and The Age of Equality (Harvard UP)