BRIEF BIOGRAPHY


Professor Yew-Kwang Ng, Professor of Economics at Monash University, was born in 1942 in Malaysia. As a young child, he was described by his uncle as '3 quarters' (not complete). He also spent 8 years to complete the 6-year primary school, repeating both grades 2 & 3. He spent most of his high-school years actively engaging in underground left-wing activities.

After the turbulence of strikes and demonstrations and several close misses of being arrested or expelled, he was lucky to graduate with a B.Com. from Nanyang University in 1966 (and later a Ph.D. from Sydney University in 1971).

Though reputed to be one of the best students among his classmates, his academic scores were rather mediocre, until he published a paper in Journal of Political Economy in 1965 and gave a copy to each of his professors. He has been a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia since 1980.

He recently received the Distinguished Fellow Award, 2007, Economic Society of Australia. He has worked in welfare economics, proposed mesoeconomics (a simplified general equilibrium analysis with both micro and macro elements) and welfare biology. He also collaborated with Xiaokai Yang on an inframarginal analysis of division of labour. He has published papers in leading journals in economics as well as in biology, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology and articles in the popular press.

Books published include Mesoeconomics: A Micro-Macro Analysis (London: Wheatsheaf, 1986), Specialization and Economic Organization (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1993, with X. Yang), Increasing Returns and Economic Analysis, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1998, with Kenneth Arrow and Xiaokai Yang), Efficiency, Equality, and Public Policy (London: Macmillan, 2000), Welfare Economics: Towards a Complete Analysis, (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004), Increasing Returns and Economic Efficiency, (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, forthcoming).