Quah 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 a visiting assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, a visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Tan Chin Tuan Visiting Professor at NUS's Department of Economics.
Research contributions
The World's Economic Centre of Gravity 1980–2050. Produced by Danny Quah, 2011
Google Scholar Citations reports that Quah's most-cited works include his 1989 paper[4] on Vector Autoregressions with Olivier Blanchard and his papers on poverty traps in cross-country economic growth[5] and the convergence of Twin Peaked income distributions.[6] His published academic writings range widely from his prize-winning[7] 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[8]—to work while still a graduate student on the appendix to the famous Monetarist paper "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" (by Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace).[9] 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.[10]
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,[11] 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.[12]
Public Dissemination
Quah's TED talks include "Global Tensions From a Rising East"[13] (March 2012) and "Economics, Democracy, and the New World Order"[14] (August 2014). Quah's public lectures and events, more generally, are available on a curated YouTube listing.[15]
The Mong Khet Circle[16] is a 6,600-kilometre (4,100 mi) diameter circle that contains more humans within it than outside of it, and placed over east Asia with its epicenter over Mong Khet Township, Myanmar. An original circle of 8,000 km (5,000 mi) diameter was originally devised by Ken Myers in 2013, before being later refined to 6,600 km (4,100 mi) by Quah, with Mong Khet being identified as the centre.
^Blanchard, Olivier Jean; Quah, Danny (1989). "The Dynamic Effects of Aggregate Demand and Supply Disturbances". American Economic Review. 79 (4): 655–673. JSTOR1827924.
^Quah, Danny (1997). "Empirics for Growth and Distribution: Stratification, Polarization, and Convergence Clubs". Journal of Economic Growth. 2: 27–59. doi:10.1023/A:1009781613339. S2CID55517603.
^Quah, Danny (1993). "Galton's Fallacy and Tests of the Convergence Hypothesis". Scandinavian Journal of Economics. 95 (4). Blackwell: 427–443. doi:10.2307/3440905. hdl:1721.1/63653. JSTOR3440905.
