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Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS)
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George Fane, BA (Hons) (Oxford), PhD (Harvard)
Adjunct Professor, The Arndt-Corden Division of Economics

Email: George.Fane@anu.edu.au
Personal pages

Biographical Statement

George Fane head and shoulders
Harkness Fellow at Harvard University (1968); Senior Research Officer at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, London (1971-75); Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, ANU (1976-91); Present position since 1992; Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (1997).

Research Interests

International macroeconomics; development economics; causes of poverty and links between poverty and growth.

Key Publications

  • 'The Incidence of a Tax on Pure Rent: the Old Reason for the Old Answer', Journal of Political Economy, 1984.
  • 'A Derivation of the IS-LM Model from Explicit Optimizing Behaviour', Journal of Macroeconomics, Fall 1985.
  • 'Neutral Taxation Under Uncertainty', Journal of Public Economics, 1987.
  • 'The Average and Marginal Domestic Resource Costs of Foreign Exchange', Oxford Economic Papers, 1995.
  • (with T. Condon) 'Trade reform in Indonesia, 1987-1995', Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 1996.
  • 'Indonesian Economic Policies and Performance', World Economy, 1999.
  • Capital Mobility, Exchange Rates and Economic Crisis, Andover, USA & Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar, 2000.

Career Highlights

With a colleague, I wrote a report on Exchange Controls and Exchange Rate Systems for the 1981 Inquiry into the Australian Financial System ('Campbell Committee'). Our main recommendations — that Australia should abandon all its exchange controls and float the dollar — were adopted by the Committee against the then strong opposition of Treasury and the Reserve Bank. I worked in Jakarta in 1987 for the Ministry of Industry and the World Bank as leader of a three-person team that studied effective protection and options for liberalising trade policy. I have since worked as a consultant for the World Bank in Indonesia (on a further five missions), Trinidad and Tobago (twice), Ghana, Madagascar, Georgia, Yemen, Ethiopia and Iran (three times, most recently in July 2001). I have consulted on tax policy for the New Zealand Treasury (three times), for the UNDP in Sri Lanka and for UNIDO in Bulgaria. In 1999, I wrote a report on Policies for Reducing the Destabilising Effects of Short-term Capital Flows for the Institution Building in Asia Project that was co-ordinated by the Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific (Sydney University) for the Ministry of Finance of the Government of Japan.