John Whalley

Background

John Whalley’s interest in applying abstract mathematical concepts to global issues stems from his time at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he worked as a teaching assistant to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. His early research focused on applying general equilibrium theory to taxation, with an initial interest in the economic integration of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, which later developed into the European Union.

John’s research quickly expanded from the domain of public finance to international trade and development, which saw him conduct part of the early computational work for the Tokyo Round of the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs. Before the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, John had already begun to examine international trade through the lens of globalization. In 1979, John was named director of the Centre for International Economic Relations at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada, a position he still holds on a joint basis.

Since the early 1990s, climate change has been a major research area for John. He has focused on the effects of alternative policy approaches, and on the interface between environment and trade. John joined CIGI as a distinguished fellow in 2004. Recently, his focus on Chinese policy issues has led him to conclude, “nothing happens in China without impacting the rest of the world.”

In January 2011, John was listed as the top-ranked Canadian researcher in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database, which factors the number of papers published and the ranking of the individual journals. He is a fellow at the Royal Society of Canada and the Econometric Society, and a foreign fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. John is the co-editor of CESifo Economic Studies, the journal published by the Center for Economic Studies (CES) and Oxford University Press, and Economic Forum published by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. A recipient of the 2012 Canada Council Killam Prizes, he is also a former joint managing editor of The World Economy.

When he isn’t conducting research or teaching, John enjoys travelling throughout China and, less frequently, the Canadian north.