Monash University Department of Economics continues to drive global impact

Monash University is a Group of Eight Australian (Go8) university, making up Australia’s leading research-intensive universities – with excellence in the Department of Economics

Fifteen Monash subjects are placed in the global top 50 with 6 subjects ranking number one in Australia, including:

• Pharmacy and Pharmacology;
• Engineering – Chemical;
• Materials Science;
• Economics and Econometrics;
• Performing Arts (equal first); and
• Statistics and Operational Research (equal first).

Expertise in economics and research

Researchers from the Department of Economics at Monash University are among the top of their field in a range of economic areas. It has a concentration of researchers in the following research areas:

• Applied Micro & Data Analytics
• Behavioural, Experimental  and Theory
• Development, Growth and Economic History
• Energy, Environment and Resource Economics
• Macro, International and Finance
• Micro, Theory, Idustrial Organization, and Network
• Political Economy and Public Economics.

Research resources at state-of-the-art facilities

Monash Economics provides its staff with a range of research resources and state-of-the-art facilities. These include databases and journal subscriptions, as well as laboratory facilities:

• Monash Business Behavioural Laboratory (MBBL)
  The Behavioural Lab is spearheading the development of decision-making research, conducted by its staff and research students. It also serves as an innovative facility for consumer and practitioner research.
• Monash Laboratory for Experimental Economics (MonLEE)
  Given our research strength in the area of behavioural and experimental economics, the department operates MonLEE in order to study the actions and behaviour of individuals under various conditions. MonLEE outputs have been the basis of published research for a range of projects.

For more details of Monash Economics, see: https://www.monash.edu/business/economics

Yew-Kwang Ng’s contributions as an emeritus professor in economics

Yew-Kwang Ng is a Professor at Monash University, a jubilee fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a member of Advisory Board, Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University. In 2007, he received the highest award (Distinguished Fellow) of the Economic Society of Australia.

He has published more than 30 books and 300 refereed journal papers in economics, biology, happiness studies, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, etc.

His major contributions include:

1. Ng, Yew-Kwang (1975), Bentham or Bergson?  Finite sensibility, utility functions and social welfare functions, Review of Economic Studies, 42(4): 545-569. Derives the utilitarian social welfare function of equally weighted sum of individual utilities from compelling axioms.
2. Kemp, Murray C. and Ng, Yew-Kwang (1976), On the existence of social welfare functions, social orderings, and social decisions functions, Economica, 43(169): 59-66. Extends Arrow’s impossibility theorem to the single profile framework, hence freeing it from Samuelson’s criticism.
3. Ng, Yew-Kwang (1977), Towards a theory of third best, Public Finance, pp. 1-15. Provides a practical policy escape from the nihilism of the second-best theory; with recent exchanges with Professor Richard Lipsey in Pacific Economic Review, 2017, 22(2): pp. 147-228.
4. Ng, Yew-Kwang (1984), Quasi-Pareto social improvements, American Economic Review, 74(5): 1033-50. Shows that it is more efficient to treat a dollar as a dollar (pure efficiency rules supreme) in specific issues, leaving the distributional objectives to the general tax/transfer system.
5. Ng, Yew-Kwang (1986), Mesoeconomics:  A Micro-Macro Analysis. London:  Harvester, pp. xv + 267. Combines the traditional micro, macro, and general-equilibrium analyses into a simplified integrated analysis allowing for non-perfect competition, obtaining results including the Monetarist, Keynesian and others as special cases.
6. Ng, Yew-Kwang (1995), Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering, Biology & Philosophy, 10(3): 255-285. Combines economic analysis and the principles of natural selection to provide insights on important questions of animal welfare: Which species are capable of welfare? Whether their welfare levels are positive or negative? How could welfare be increased? Background of writing this paper was interviewed by Max Carpendale, and published in Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, 2015，3(2): 197-202.
7. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2003), From preference to happiness: Towards a more complete welfare economics, Social Choice and Welfare, 2003, 20: 307-50. Pushes welfare economics from the level of preference to that of welfare/happiness.
8. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2004), Welfare Economics: Towards a More Complete Analysis, London:  Palgrave/Macmillan, pp. xiii+355 (ISBN 0-333-97121-3). A monograph in welfare economics that is suitable for use as a textbook.
9. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2007), Eternal Coase and external costs: A case for bilateral taxation and amenity rights, European Journal of Political Economy, 23: 641-59. Shows that Nobel laureate Ronald Coase’ case against the Pigouvian taxation of pollution is based on ignoring an asymmetry due to using an all-or-nothing comparison only. Awarded Best Paper Prize at the Economics and Environment Network National Workshop 2005, Australian National University.
10. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2008), Environmentally responsible happy nation index, Social Indicators Research, 85:425–446. Proposes a national success indicator to complement/supplement GDP, taking account of happiness positively and environmental disruption negatively; with an extended analysis by Chen, et al. in 2016; same journal.
11. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2016), The importance of global extinction in climate change policy, Global Policy, 2016, 7(3): 315-322. Reducing risks of global extinction is more important than consumption trade-off in climate change.
12. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2019a). Markets and Morals: Justifying Kidney Sales and Legalizing Prostitution, Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-316-64657-1. Markets may be used more in many scopes beneficially.
13. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2019b). Evolved-God Creationism, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-5275-3384-4. Using five compelling axioms, this book shows that God evolved in the wider universe and created our sub-universe.
14. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2019c). Keynote: Global extinction and animal welfare: Two priorities for effective altruism (Atkinson Memorial Lecture), Global Policy, 10(2): 258-66.
15. Ng, Yew-Kwang (2019d)., Utilitarianism: Overcoming the difficulty of interpersonal comparison (October 10, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3939956 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3939956
16. Ng, Yew-Kwang （2022）. Happiness: Concept, Measurement, and Promotion, Springer, open access at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-33-4972-8

For an independent evaluation, see:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/07/robert-wiblin-interviews-yew-kwang-ng.html