Asian Development Bank set to appoint first Chinese chief economist

Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2014-05-25

Dr Shang-Jin Wei attends the "New Openness in China" forum held
at Beijing's Tsinghua University, Oct. 17, 2012. (Photo/CFP)

For the first time in its 48-year history, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will invite a Chinese national to serve as its chief economist, reports the Shanghai-based China Business Daily, citing bank sources on May 23.

Dr Shang-Jin Wei, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University in the US, may soon be appointed as chief economist of ADB, while serving concurrently as director of its Economics and Research Department. ADB has yet to announce the appointment as of press time, however.

Wei has been a shining star among Chinese economists. He has held the position of professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Business since 2007 and is also director for the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER's) Working Group on the Chinese Economy. His main academic research has focused on such fields as international finance, international trade, government's governance and reform, the Chinese economy and macroeconomics.

According to rankings of a total 31,000 global economists issued in 2012 by IDEAS, a RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, Wei ranked in 152nd place, the best ranking among Chinese economists.

When Justin Yifu Lin wound up his four-year service as chief economist of the World Bank in June 2012, Wei was one of the hottest candidates for the post. Some in the economics circle even commented that as far as academic achievements and age are concerned, Wei will most likely become the first Chinese national to win the Nobel Prize for Economics.

In a recent e-mail to Shanghai's National Business Daily in response to questioning on the rumors, Wei said, "As ADB has yet to announce the appointment, I have no comment on it." But he acknowledged to the paper that if the appointment becomes a reality, he will be first native Chinese to serve as ADB's chief economist in its history.

ADB's current chief economist, Changyong Rhee, is from South Korea, while his predecessor, Dr Jong-Wha Lee, was also South Korean. The bank's current deputy chief economist Zhuang Juzhong is Chinese, however.

After graduating from Fudan University in Shanghai in 1986, Wei received his masters in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, and receive a masters in business administration (finance) and a PhD in economics from University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and 1992, respectively.

Wei's outstanding performance in the economics field has mainly resulted from his dedicated research efforts, China Business Daily said. Wei's most prominent research paper in China is a NBER working paper titled "Tracing Value-added and Double Counting in Gross Exports."

The research paper found that China contributes a value-added of only US$6 to the entire global supply chain of Apple's smartphones for each iphone assembled in the mainland, but the whole export value of US$358 for each iphone exported from China is calculated into the nation's gross exports. It marked the first time for a Chinese economist to use the value-added accounting method to figure out how China's gross exports are seriously bloated.