Level 37 2 Lonsdale St Melbourne, VIC 3000 Australia
Description
The topic
To what extent do standard economic models help us in understanding the financial and business economic environment in China? In this talk Mark Crosby will argue that while standard models are useful, economists have to think laterally and also use many non-standard approaches in order to understand the business environment. For example, the Chinese language affects a number of important economic variables, including innovation and also macroeconomic variables such as savings rates. “Guanxi,” loosely translated as relationships leads Chinese people to approach business relationships quite differently from those of us brought up on the rational maximising agent paradigm.
Mark’s talk will blend economic theory with some new approaches from behavioural economics, anthropology, and the geography of thought, as well as examples from his visits to several hundred companies in China in the past decade.
The speaker
Mark Crosby is an Associate Professor in Economics at Melbourne Business School. Mark graduated with a PhD from Queen’s University in Canada in 1993, and since that time Mark has had academic appointments at the University of Toronto, the University of New South Wales, and Melbourne University. In 2011 Mark accepted the role of Dean at the S P Jain School of Global Management in Singapore, before returning to Melbourne Business School in 2013. Mark’s academic interests are in international macroeconomics, with particular interest in policy issues in the Australian and Asian regions. His published research has covered topics such as the role of exchange rates in affecting macroeconomic fluctuations, the impact of macroeconomic factors on election outcomes, and the properties of business cycles. Mark has acted as a consultant to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and to the Monetary Authority of Singapore on a number of projects since 1998, and he has an ongoing Research Fellowship position at the HKMA. He also consults widely to business and government both in Australia and overseas. His most recent consultancies have examined policies for diversifying Brunei’s economy, and policy issues related to South Africa’s increasing current account deficit. Mark is also a regular contributor to the Australian Financial Review and The Age newspapers, and he is a sought after public speaker on matters relating to the macroeconomy.
