Trinity Economist Receives International Award for Research on the Wealth of 145 Countries
Posted on: 24 February 2010
Professor of International Macroeconomics, Philip Lane, of Trinity’s Economics Department and Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS) has been selected for the 2010 Bhagwati Award, jointly with his collaborator Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti of the International Monetary Fund. A prize is given every two years for the best article published in the Journal of International Economics during the previous two years. The award is in honour of the renowned trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati for his many contributions to the field of international economics.
Selected by the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Economics, the sixth paper to win the Bhagwati Award is The External Wealth of Nations: Mark II: Revised and Extended Estimates of Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1970-2004 by Philip R.Lane and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, which appeared in the JIE in November 2007.
The External Wealth of Nations project calculates the foreign asset and foreign liability positions for 145+ countries since 1970 and is widely used in academia, policy organisations and the financial sector in the analysis of topics such as global imbalances, debt sustainability and financial globalisation. The original version of this database was developed in the late 1990s. The Mark II version expanded the country coverage from 67 to 145 countries and extended the time period covered by the dataset. The dataset was described by The Economist magazine (September 22nd, 2005) as “the world’s best dataset on foreign assets and liabilities” and it is widely used around the world in research on financial globalisation by academics, policy organisations and the private sector.
Commenting on the award,
Professor Lane
said: “The Journal of International Economics is the leading field journal in international economics, with many of the world’s leading international economists on its Editorial Board so it is quite an honour to be selected for this award. It is valuable recognition for a large-scale project that has expanded over the last decade. Research students at the IIIS have assisted in the development of the dataset and several doctoral dissertations have been devoted to the analysis of these data. This award further establishes the reputation of the IIIS as a leading centre for research in international economics.”
