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Press Release - AL 15

The West took 300 years to innovate and industrialize, Japan less than 100, and East Asia took only 40 to imitate like flying geese and catch up. Like their forerunners, China and India have exploited their low-wage advantage to power labour-intensive industries and accelerate growth. While wages rise in the ‘Asian dragons’, what can poorer country governments do to catch up? In the new structural economics and the growth identification and facilitation, Professor Lin presents a framework that can guide governments of poorer countries on how to foster new industries which reflect latent comparative advantage.

Professor Finn Tarp, UNU-WIDER Director, said: ‘The WIDER Annual Lecture is one of the most important events on the Institute’s calendar and is delivered every year by an eminent international scholar. We are honoured that Professor Justin Lin will be speaking on such a timely and relevant subject at this Annual Lecture. In our effort to reach out to a truly global audience of policy makers and researchers we are in 2011 organizing the annual lecture for the first time in Africa, in the capital of Mozambique.’

Professor Lin is Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank. In this capacity, Professor Lin guides the Bank’s intellectual leadership playing a key role in shaping its economic research agenda, and currently he is undertaking an ambitious research programme that examines the industrialization of rapidly developing countries to shed new light on causes of lagging growth in poorer regions. Professor Lin took up his World Bank position in June 2008, after serving 15 years as Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University. Building on a distinguished career as one of China’s leading economists, Professor Lin holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and is the World Bank’s first chief economist from a developing country. Professor Lin is on leave from the University of Peking during his World Bank tenure. He has received several distinctions, and has published numerous academic books and articles.

OFFICIAL CV OF PROFESSOR JUSTIN YIFU LIN:

Justin Yifu Lin is World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, Development Economics. In this capacity, Mr. Lin guides the Bank’s intellectual leadership and plays a key role in shaping the economic research agenda of the institution. Building on a distinguished career as one of China’s leading economists, Mr. Lin is undertaking an ambitious research program that examines the industrialization of rapidly developing countries and sheds new light on the causes of lagging growth in poor regions.

He took up his World Bank position on June 2, 2008, after serving for 15 years as Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University. He will remain on leave from Peking University during his World Bank tenure. Mr. Lin received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986 and is the author of 18 books, including The China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform, which has been published in seven languages, and Economic Development and Transition: Thought, Strategy, and Viability, which is available in Chinese and English. He has published more than 100 articles in refereed international journals and collected volumes on history, development, and transition.

Among his many public roles in China, Justin Yifu Lin served as a deputy of China’s People’s Congress and Vice Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He has served on several national and international committees, leading groups, and councils on development policy, technology, and environment including: the United Nations Millennium Task Force on Hunger; the Eminent Persons Group of the Asian Development Bank; the National Committee on United States-China Relations; the Hong Kong-U.S. Business Council; the Working Group on the future of the OECD; and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee.

He was awarded the 1993 and 2001 Sun Yefang Prize (the highest honor for economists in China), the 1993 Policy Article Prize of Centre for International Food and Agricultural Policy at University of Minnesota, the 1997 Sir John Crawford Award of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, the 1999 Best Article Prize of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Citation Classic Award in 2000 (by the publisher of Social Science Citation Index), fellow of Academy of Sciences for Developing World in 2005 and honorary doctoral degrees from Universite D’Auvergne, Fordham University, Nottingham University and City University of Hong Kong.

He gave the 2007-2008 Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University on 31 October-1 November 2007. Mr. Lin is the World Bank’s first chief economist from a developing country and succeeds Francois Bourguignon.