The Corden Lecture 2015 Superstar Firms in the Global Economy

The academic discipline of international trade has been revolutionized in recent years by a new focus on the role of firms in the global economy. New data sources have revealed previously unsuspected features of the importance of global firms, and new analytic approaches have been developed to rationalize these findings and to explore their implications for theory and policy. Professor Peter Neary of Oxford University will review these new developments and ask what lessons can be learned from them. How do they affect our understanding of the workings of the global economy? And what are their implications for policy-makers and concerned citizens? Peter Neary Peter Neary is Professor of Economics at Oxford University and a Professorial Fellow of Merton College Oxford. Born in 1950 in Drogheda, Ireland,he was educated at University College Dublin and Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. in 1978. From 1980 to 2006 he was Professor of Political Economy at University College Dublin. His publications include Measuring the Restrictiveness of International Trade Policy (with Jim Anderson, MIT Press, 2005) as well as over a hundred professional papers, mainly on international trade. Peter is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Econometric Society, and a former President of the European Economic Association. He has lectured widely, including the 2002 Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics and the 2008-2009 Graham Lecture at Princeton, and was the inaugural recipient of the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Social Sciences in 2006. Peter is the author of a joint paper with Max Corden, published in the Economic Journal in 1982, which is widely credited with developing the theory of the Dutch Disease. - the problems of adjustment which can paradoxically follow a sudden increase in wealth as a result of foreign aid or the development of natural resources.