Woo Wing Thye

Woo Wing Thye (Chinese 胡永泰) is a Malaysian-American economist. He is currently Professor of Economics at University of California, Davis and Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a member of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE).

Professor Woo recently took up the position of President of the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia in Malaysia and holds academic positions at the Penang Institute, the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing and Fudan Universityin Shanghai.

Woo is an expert on East Asian economies particularly China, Malaysia and Indonesia. He has written extensively on the middle-income trap as well as on transition economics, globalization, exchange rate economics and regional economic disparity.

He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1982 with a thesis entitled 'Exchange rate determination under rational expectations : a structural approach'.

Woo was born in 1954 in George Town, Penang. Following undergraduate study in economics and engineering at Swarthmore College, he took an MA in Economics at Yale and, later an MA and Ph.D at Harvard (1982). Woo joined the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1985.

Woo has worked as a consultant on tax and exchange rate reform for China's Ministry of Finance and, between 1994 and 1996, led an international team, which included Leszek Balcerowicz, Boris Fyodorov, Fan Gang and Jeffrey D. Sachs to study the reform experiences of centrally planned economies. From 1997-1998, he was a special advisor to the U.S. Treasury.

In 2001, Woo helped establish the Asian Economic Panel (AEP), a forum of about 80 specialists on Asian economies, which meets three times a year to discuss issues of importance to the region's economies. Selected proceedings of the AEP are published in the Asian Economic Papers, MIT Press

From 2002 until 2005, Woo was a special advisor for East Asian Economies to the UN Millennium Project. In 2007, Woo served on the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). In July 2005, he was appointed to the International Advisory Panel for Malaysia's then Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and an economics advisor to the state of Penang in April 2008. He was Executive Director of the Penang Institute, the Penang State Government's public policy think tank between 2012 and 2013 and was appointed the founding Presidentof the Jeffrey Cheah Institute (JCI) on Southeast Asia in 2014. JCI is an independent think tank, established in Malaysia by the Jeffrey Cheah Foundation, to conduct policy-oriented research on Southeast Asia.

Professor Woo's academic and research interests focus on economies in transition, notably China, Malaysia and Indonesia. His research covers China's economic reformsas well as its sources of growthand the wealth gap, which Woo argues has been significantly understated.

Woo was recently described as, "one of the world's foremost experts on the Chinese economy,"and appears regularly in the media. He is also a contributor to Project Syndicate.