B Eng, M Eng Sci (Melbourne), MS (Harvard), PhD (Harvard)
,
Economics
2019
Professor Tyers conducts research and teaching in applied international economics. Having completed his first degree in engineering at the University of Melbourne he made the transition to economics and went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard. His engineering background meant mathematical models and optimization methods came naturally to him, and this led to a focus in his teaching and research contributions on models based on the economic theory of optimizing agents. He sees his work as following in the tradition of Peter Dixon and his colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies, where models are used for projection and policy analysis though their primary roles are to enhance our understanding of economic behaviour in the aggregate, thus making us better economists.
Apart from his regular university teaching and research supervision, for which he has received numerous awards for excellence, he has taught economic analysis at the Australian Treasury, DFAT, the Productivity Commission and the World Bank. He has also been successful in gaining competitive research grants, extensively from the ARC but also from the RIRDC, ACIAR, the World Bank, DFAT and the private sector. His research is published widely in books and in journals that include the European Economic Review, Economic Modelling, (the UK) Journal of Agricultural Economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, The World Economy, World Development, the Journal of Asian Economics and the China Economic Review.
His early research addressed problems in global food markets. The modelling employed was innovative in its multi-commodity, multi-country structure, its dynamics and its stochastic behaviour, enabling the analysis of food price volatility and its dependence on insulating trade policies. Widely acclaimed joint work with Kym Anderson addressed trade policy issues arising during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. It led to more than 20 papers plus a major CUP book. He then went on to examine how external shocks, such as the opening of the Chinese economy and trade liberalization, are transmitted less than perfectly to domestic labour markets. Extending his models to include oligopoly behavior he was able to examine how microeconomic reforms, such as in Australia in the 1990s, led eventually to excessive market power. Subsequently, by incorporating demographic behaviour into a dynamic global model, he was able to examine the economic effects of ageing and its consequences for economic structure, performance, exchange rates and inequality on a global scale. Both demography and macroeconomic analysis feature in his work on the role of China in the global economy. Topics include its demographic dividend, its current demographic contraction, its macroeconomic policies as they affect its exchange rate and, most recently, its trade war with the US. His recent research also addresses automation and inequality as means to explain declining productivity, inflation and interest rates and their implications for future macroeconomic policy in the world’s large economies.
2009- Winthrop Professor of Economics in the Business School, University of Western Australia, Perth. Adjunct Professor of Economics, ANU Research School of Economics, College of Business and Economics, Canberra
2001-2009 Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Economics, Australian National University, Canberra
1993-2001 Reader, Department of Economics in the Faculties, Australian National University, Canberra.
1990-1993 Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics in the Faculties, Australian National University, Canberra.
1987-1990 Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Adelaide, South Australia.
1984-1987 Research Fellow in Economics, National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University.
1982-1984 Research Fellow, Department of Economics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.
1980-1981 Research Associate, Resource Systems Institute, East West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.
1978-1979 Research Fellow, Resource Systems Institute, East West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Adjunct Professor, Research School of Economics, ANU
Research Associate, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, ANU
External Fellow, Global Trade Analysis Project, Purdue University, 1998-2012