Danny Quah


Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Quah's work includes contributions to the fields of economic growth, development economics, monetary economics, macroeconometrics, and the weightless economy. Quah is best known for his research on estimation techniques for disentangling the effects of different disturbances on economies, for his studies on economic growth and convergence across nation states, and for his analyses of large-scale shifts in the global economy. Quah became the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, beginning his term on 1 May 2018.

Early years

Quah was born in Penang, in the Federation of Malaya which later became Malaysia, and attended the Penang Free School before leaving for university studies in the United States.

Career

Quah obtained his A.B. from Princeton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He worked as assistant professor of economics at MIT before joining the Economics Department at LSE in 1991. Quah was, for 2006–2009, Head of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was, through 2016, Professor of Economics and International Development, and founding Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE. Quah joined the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS as Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics in August 2016.
Quah had served previously as Council Member on Malaysia's National Economic Advisory Council and as Consultant for the Bank of England, the World Bank, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Currently, he is on the advisory board of OMFIF where he is regularly involved in meetings regarding the financial and monetary system. Quah had also worked as visiting assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and Tan Chin Tuan Visiting Professor at NUS's Department of Economics.

Research contributions

Citations reports that Quah's most-cited works include his 1989 paper on Vector Autoregressions with Olivier Blanchard and his papers on poverty traps in cross-country economic growth and the convergence of Twin Peaked income distributions. His published academic writings range widely from his prize-winning 2011 paper on the shifting global economy - mapping the eastwards movement in the world's economic center of gravity away from its 1980s mid-Atlantic location - to work while still a graduate student on the appendix to the famous Monetarist paper "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic". Quah calls The Great Shift East the move in the world's economic center of gravity out of the mid-Atlantic location where it had been for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, pulled by the rise of economies in the east. Between 1980 and 2010 that economic center of gravity moved 5,000 km east, to the Persian Gulf, on a trajectory that continues to take it towards the boundary between India and China.
Although the early part of his career saw close attention to technical developments in timeseries econometrics, Quah became heavily influenced by the approach to communicating ideas exemplified in the work of Edward Tufte, and sought similar dissemination of his research to a wider audience. He has also argued that research on economic development needs to be inextricably linked to scholarly work in International Relations.

Public Dissemination

Quah's TED talks include "Global Tensions From a Rising East" and "Economics, Democracy, and the New World Order". Quah's public lectures and events, more generally, are available on a curated YouTube listing.

Papers