International macroeconomics; development economics; causes of poverty and links between poverty and growth.

Harkness Fellow at Harvard University (1968); Senior Research Officer at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, London (1971-75); Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, ANU (1976-91); Present position since 1992; Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (1997).

Career highlights

With a colleague, I wrote a report on Exchange Controls and Exchange Rate Systems for the 1981 Inquiry into the Australian Financial System ('Campbell Committee'). Our main recommendations — that Australia should abandon all its exchange controls and float the dollar — were adopted by the Committee against the then strong opposition of Treasury and the Reserve Bank. I worked in Jakarta in 1987 for the Ministry of Industry and the World Bank as leader of a three-person team that studied effective protection and options for liberalising trade policy. I have since worked as a consultant for the World Bank in Indonesia (on a further five missions), Trinidad and Tobago (twice), Ghana, Madagascar, Georgia, Yemen, Ethiopia and Iran (three times, most recently in July 2001). I have consulted on tax policy for the New Zealand Treasury (three times), for the UNDP in Sri Lanka and for UNIDO in Bulgaria. In 1999, I wrote a report on Policies for Reducing the Destabilising Effects of Short-term Capital Flows for the Institution Building in Asia Project that was co-ordinated by the Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific (Sydney University) for the Ministry of Finance of the Government of Japan.