Distinguished Fellow

Abstract

Peter Warr is the John Crawford Professor of Agricultural Economics, Emeritus, at the Australian National University. At the time of his retirement from the ANU in 2014, he had held the Crawford Chair for 24 years and was Head of the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics and Director of the Poverty Research Centre. Peter began his study of agricultural economics at the University of Sydney in the mid-1960s, under Keith Campbell, John Longworth and Bruce Davidson, writing a final-year thesis on the food consumption of age pensioners in Glebe. He subsequently obtained a master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics, under Amartya Sen, and a PhD in applied economics from Stanford University, under Peter Timmer and Walter Falcon. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota and a lecturer in economics at Monash University before joining the ANU in 1980. A feature of Peter's work, from his undergraduate thesis to the present day, has been the determination to apply economic analysis to understanding the economic circumstances for the poorest people. His research has dealt extensively with the relationships between economic policy, structural transformation, technological change and poverty incidence in developing countries, including the adaptation of general equilibrium modelling to address these issues. He has published widely on the Thai and Indonesian economies, focusing especially on the determinants of poverty reduction. In addition to visiting appointments at Harvard and Yale, he has been a visiting professor of economics at Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. He has also acted as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the OECD, various United Nations agencies, USAID and AusAID. Peter has published over 200 journal articles and chapters in books, which have appeared in all the major agricultural economics and development economics journals, together with the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Economica, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Public Economics, The World Economy and The Economic Record. He has also written or edited three books on Thailand, The Thai Economy in Transition (Cambridge UP), Thailand's Macroeconomic Miracle, 1970 to 1995 (Oxford UP) and Thailand Beyond the Crisis (Routledge). He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, elected in 1997. Within AARES, Peter has been an energetic proponent of developing the links between the Society and kindred professional bodies in developing countries, especially in South-East Asia. He has been an active contributor to the Society's journal, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and his article with an Indonesian colleague, Arief Anshory Yusuf, was awarded the journal's Best Article prize in 2011. He was president of AARES in 2013–2014.