Professor Richard Pomfret

Professor Richard Pomfret
  • Biography/ Background

    Dr. Richard Pomfret has been Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide since 1992. Before coming to Adelaide, he was Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, Bologna (Italy) and Nanjing (China). He previously worked at Concordia University in Montréal and the Institut für Weltwirtschaft at the University of Kiel in Germany. He has also held visiting positions at universities in Australia, Canada, China, France, Italy and the USA, and is an honorary Fellow of the Centre for Euro-Asian Studies at the University of Reading, UK, of Monash University European Centre, of the Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw, and of the research centre ROSES-CNRS at Université-Paris I.

    Richard Pomfret has acted as adviser to the Australian government and to international organizations such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and United Nations Development Programme.  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.  He has also worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris on several occasions while on leave from Adelaide.

    His research interests centre on economic development and international economics, and he has published over a hundred papers in these fields. He has written seventeen 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), Regionalism in East Asia (2011),The Age of Equality: The twentieth century in economic perspective, published by Harvard University Press (2011) and Trade Facilitation, co-authored with Patricia Sourdin and published by Edward Elgar (2012).  He has also written  textbooks on international trade and on development economics, and edited a textbook on Australian trade policies.  

    Richard Pomfret was Jean Monnet Chair on Economics of European Intergration from 2017 -2020 

  • Files

  • Media Expertise

    CategoriesEconomics & Finance, Foreign Countries & People
    ExpertiseCentral Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyz Republic, Turkmenistan); Southeast Asia (ASEAN: International trade; economic development.
    NotesAlt phone: (08) 8303 5540
    After hours(08) 8267 1190

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Entry last updated: Sunday, 3 Oct 2021