Danny Quah is Professor of Economics and Kuwait Professor of Economics and International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS, Chair of the LSE-PKU Summer School Board, Academic Director of LSE’s Executive Summer School, Director of Public Relations for the Economics Department, and Director of LSE’s Kuwait Research Programme. Quah served on Malaysia’s National Economic Advisory Council 2009-2011; he was the first Head of Department for Economics at LSE 2006-2009.
Quah holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and was Assistant Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining LSE. In 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University; and in 2011 at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Since 2010 Quah has been Tan Chin Tuan Visiting Professor in the Economics Department at the National University of Singapore.
In December 2012 in Beijing, Quah was given Hanban’s Confucius Institute Individual Performance Excellence Award for “promoting greater understanding on China’s place in the world, by insightfully analyzing and effectively communicating to general audiences worldwide the effects of shifts in the global economy and of the rise of the east”.
In March 2012, Quah gave a TEDx talk on “Global Tensions from a Rising East”. In October 2011, he gave the Confucius Institute for Business London Annual Public Lecture “627 Million Chinese Lifted Out of Poverty - Where Did It All Go Wrong?” and, at Peking University, the lecture “China and the Global Public Good” for the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. In June 2011, he delivered the inaugural LSE Big Questions Lecture “East beats West?”. In April 2011, Quah gave the Eighth SER Distinguished Public Lecture on “The Shifting Global Balance of Power” in Singapore; in January 2011, he delivered a lecture on the tensions of international power restructuring in a shifting global economy, as part of the Ralph Miliband Series at LSE on the Restructuring of World Power.
Quah was chair and panellist on Sustaining Asia’s Competitiveness at the Tianjin 2010 World Economic Forum Summer Davos Annual Meeting of the New Champions. Early in 2009 he delivered the Goh Keng Swee Lecture in Singapore on China’s economic growth, and the World Economy Asia lecture (“Will Asia save the world?”) in Kuala Lumpur. In May 2009, together with Lord Charles Powell and Sir David Tang, he opposed Gurcharan Das, Deepak Lal, and Mark Tully, in debating the motion “The future belongs to India, not China” at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
Prof Quah’s research is now on the global economy, economic growth and development, income inequality, and international economic relations. He is investigating in particular the eastwards drift of global economic activity, and the implications of such ongoing shift: he tries to make large things visible to the naked eye. He has also worked in time series econometrics, inflation, and business cycles. Some of Quah’s writings have been translated into 18 languages.
At the LSE he used to lecture in the largest course (Introductory Economics) taught in the School. Quah now teaches econometrics and economic development policy in LSE’s MSc programmes, and Introductory Macroeconomics as well as Economics and Public Policy for LSE’s BSc programme. He lectures on The Global Financial Crisis for LSE100, and on The Global Economy for the LSE-PKU Summer School in Beijing and for LSE’s MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy.
Prof Quah blogs at http://dannyquah.wordpress.com/